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What does it have to do with interest rate? I have seen microservices being used to decouple release management and deployment. To untie organizational depende

What 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 ago
There 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 ago
The 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 ago
  AWS/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.

wmf 2y ago

There 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 ago

The 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 ago
AWS/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.