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In my experience a new micro-service considered the default option for anything which could be done as a micro-service nowadays. Library API design is the lost

In my experience a new micro-service considered the default option for anything which could be done as a micro-service nowadays. Library API design is the lost art (almost). And the choose is not always obvious for non-technical reasons. Consider a following example: you have 3 micro-services X, Y, Z which need to interact with a platform G but this interaction requires non-trivial chunk of code. It can be done as a library or as a new adapter micro-service A which will encapsulate knowledge about platform G and will interact with X, Y, Z the way it would be easier for X, Y, Z developers to integrate. Micro-service will add network latency but will allow to make/deploy all changes only to service A. With a library one would have to test and release a new version and then ask X, Y, Z maintainers to switch to this new version. In some organizations it will be a very slow process because X, Y, Z can put an update request (from the library team) at the bottom of the backlog. With a micro-service A teams X, Y, Z would have much less power to stop/slow development.

geraldwhen 3y ago
This is making technology objectively worse to solve people problems, and this only expands. More software needs iron clad leadership and control. Any organization that lacks this can’t help but produce shit software. There has to be a single person with real decision making power than can force upgrades and prioritization of work, and they need to be able to axe people or teams who can’t hack it.
- fmbb 3y ago
  OK but most business compete in a market. And the people they employ are in a labour market. It seems that worse is better. What we see is just another manifestation of the current economic paradigm. Waste is winning. Making too many pairs of jeans so we burn tons of perfectly good new pairs daily wins. Throwing hundreds of engineers on problems bashing out hundreds of thousands of lines of code sending megabyte messages between dozens of service instances in multiple kubernetes clusters appear to be a winning move. Otherwise someone would beat them, right?
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    Most engineering orgs don’t understand or feel “the market” until mass layoffs. They exit their companies with beautiful resumes touting micro services and k8s.
bardsore 3y ago
Worked a place where we switched from having a client library to making the other teams use our APIs directly themselves. Of course, we had to do the switch for them because they were too busy... Pretty much just copy-pasted the library code directly into their projects.

geraldwhen 3y ago

This is making technology objectively worse to solve people problems, and this only expands. More software needs iron clad leadership and control. Any organization that lacks this can’t help but produce shit software. There has to be a single person with real decision making power than can force upgrades and prioritization of work, and they need to be able to axe people or teams who can’t hack it.

fmbb 3y ago
OK but most business compete in a market. And the people they employ are in a labour market. It seems that worse is better. What we see is just another manifestation of the current economic paradigm. Waste is winning. Making too many pairs of jeans so we burn tons of perfectly good new pairs daily wins. Throwing hundreds of engineers on problems bashing out hundreds of thousands of lines of code sending megabyte messages between dozens of service instances in multiple kubernetes clusters appear to be a winning move. Otherwise someone would beat them, right?
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  Most engineering orgs don’t understand or feel “the market” until mass layoffs. They exit their companies with beautiful resumes touting micro services and k8s.

bardsore 3y ago

Worked a place where we switched from having a client library to making the other teams use our APIs directly themselves. Of course, we had to do the switch for them because they were too busy... Pretty much just copy-pasted the library code directly into their projects.