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The only good argument I know for microservices is organizational: When each team is responsible for one microservice, they can manage that with much less pain

The only good argument I know for microservices is organizational: When each team is responsible for one microservice, they can manage that with much less painful coordination with other teams.

jeltz 2y ago
My experience has been the total opposite. When each team is responsible for a service then to build anything complex you need to have meetings with stakeholders from a bunch of teams. So much time wasted on coordination compared to when working on a monolith. There you usually just need to get buyin from the platform team plus at most one other team. And that assuming you can't just build it and open s pull request which is often the case.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  I also definitely prefer a monolith, if possible!
4ndrewl 2y ago
And TBF this is a great reason for why microservices.
- fragmede 2y ago
  That's the why, but the implication is that it's possibly not the most efficient way to build the system, and that we can't do better because we're no good at communication.
rqtwteye 2y ago
Yes, they can do their own thing without having to worry about their pesky users. In reality, this means that when you consume somebody else’s service and you need something changed, you have the choice to either hack up your own thing or somehow convince the service team to put your needed changes on the backlog. From my experience you often end up with everybody implementing some version of what the official service is supposed to do because the service can’t be bothered to make the changes within a reasonable time frame. I would do micro services only once the requirements are very stable and there is a clear need for scalability. Microservice first architecture is a recipe for complexity.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  I think the cross team dynamics you describe works the same way in a monolith architecture. One difference/advantage in a monolith is that you don't have to worry which version the other microservices are on.
fragmede 2y ago
Conway's law
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  That's a big part of it!

The only good argument I know for microservices is organizational: When each team is responsible for one microservice, they can manage that with much less painful coordination with other teams.

jeltz 2y ago

My experience has been the total opposite. When each team is responsible for a service then to build anything complex you need to have meetings with stakeholders from a bunch of teams. So much time wasted on coordination compared to when working on a monolith. There you usually just need to get buyin from the platform team plus at most one other team. And that assuming you can't just build it and open s pull request which is often the case.

BurningFrog 2y ago
I also definitely prefer a monolith, if possible!

4ndrewl 2y ago

And TBF this is a great reason for why microservices.

fragmede 2y ago
That's the why, but the implication is that it's possibly not the most efficient way to build the system, and that we can't do better because we're no good at communication.

rqtwteye 2y ago

Yes, they can do their own thing without having to worry about their pesky users. In reality, this means that when you consume somebody else’s service and you need something changed, you have the choice to either hack up your own thing or somehow convince the service team to put your needed changes on the backlog. From my experience you often end up with everybody implementing some version of what the official service is supposed to do because the service can’t be bothered to make the changes within a reasonable time frame. I would do micro services only once the requirements are very stable and there is a clear need for scalability. Microservice first architecture is a recipe for complexity.

BurningFrog 2y ago
I think the cross team dynamics you describe works the same way in a monolith architecture. One difference/advantage in a monolith is that you don't have to worry which version the other microservices are on.

fragmede 2y ago

Conway's law

BurningFrog 2y ago
That's a big part of it!