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The microservices craze was perhaps the purest example of a ZIRP
- wryoak 2y agoIt’s fascinating to see how the other side thinks sometimes. Most of the places I’ve worked have been dogmatically averse to scarequote “microservices.”
- throwaway11460 2y agoWhat does it have to do with interest rate? I have seen microservices being used to decouple release management and deployment. To untie organizational dependencies. To separate cyber/dependency supply chain attack surface area. To reuse parts of the system in other projects. To take advantage of different platforms better suited for that specific job (e.g. most of backend in Typescript, ML/statistic parts in Python). Never to borrow money, though. I participated in some talks with VCs and they never cared or knew they should care. Where do they give out money for using microservices?
- wmf 2y agoThere are tales of managers/VPs in FAANG getting promoted based on how many people they hired. More money allows more people which requires more coordination which leads to microservices.
- mike_hearn 2y agoThe phrase "a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) phenomenon" means something that [the speaker thinks] is egregiously inefficient but which people got away with because the cost of money was low. VCs do care about these things, I remember hearing there was at least one well known VC that insisted that its startups all used AWS even for services that weren't cost competitive. They didn't want their startups to go viral and then not be able to scale, and if that meant some marginal businesses went from "profitable but unremarkable" to "unprofitable and dead" then so be it. This strategy worked because the sizes of the funds raised by the VCs were very large, and so investments were large, and so startups could afford to not think too hard about the costs of things. So the path DHH is arguing goes: 1. ZIRP pushes investors into high risk assets like VC funds. 2. VC funds give out huge investments to software startups. 3. Startups do lots of expensive things without worrying about the cost. 4. Having lots of microservices is expensive and the cost isn't justified by the benefits. 5. Therefore, microservices are a ZIRP phenomenon.
- throwaway11460 2y agoAWS/Azure/GCP is suggested because it's easier to hire someone who can maintain it after the founders burn out or exit, and most importantly because the VCs have access to loads of free credits that can get you through the first year or two, effectively increasing their investment (and yours too). Nothing stops you from just running an EC2 VM there, this has nothing to do with microservices. I never had a VC ask me about software system architecture, though yes they strongly suggested we use AWS, which we luckily did. There are services on AWS that bring significant benefit even if your app is a monolith - managed DB, email service, queues, nowadays the ML things, and in the past DevOps pipelines and Git repos before that became free/available on GitHub.
- manishsharan 2y agoWhat is ZIRP?
- throwaway11460 2y agoGoogle says zero interest rate policy. No idea how is it related to software architecture though. Maybe it's one of those people who think that software engineers like to give themselves more work and headache just because, and can't imagine there's something other than his own experience? But whenever I participated in this decision, it was under heavy scrutiny by multiple layers of tech and corporate leadership, and done only because it was the best way to solve our problems.
- apantel 2y agoZero interest rates -> huge surplus of capital looking for return -> investments in VC and tech -> explosion in tech projects without having to Keep It Simple Stupid -> explosion in complexity (i.e. micro services) and hiring.
- throwaway11460 2y agoIf the capital needs returns, how come they don't need to keep it KISS? Seems like they wouldn't only if it helped them get the returns.
- apantel 2y agoI think it’s more that because there was so much capital looking for an outlet, anyone could suggest any big large thing and the money would be made available. Vs tight times where every expenditure is scrutinized.
- mike_hearn 2y agoIf the world is given no choice but to give you money, you're not going to be careful with that money. DHH argues that careful engineers would use microservices a lot less.
- seo-speedwagon 2y agoIf you take microservices to mean more isolated and lightweight runtimes and moving away from “single bigass server”, then disagree. I remember multihour deployments where each team would have to stage and coordinate their rollouts with each other and it sucked, no one liked it. If you mean how Uber famously had like 8000 microservices, more than 1 for each engineer, then sure. But it’s mixing up cause and effect. Aligning deployment boundaries with domain boundaries is, all things equal, a good idea. ZIRP-gorged unicorns would have found makework one way or another.
- Khelavaster 2y agoDevs sometomes lose touch of the idea of modular libraries with package managers and OO interfaces, and end up tricked into using independently deploysble, independently managed modules for no good reason.