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Comment by oaktowner | Hacker News Reader

You're giving me flashbacks.

But the parallels are eerie. Someone gives a nomenclature to a style of architecture that many people were already using (just last week I heard that Netflix "invented" microservices), and suddenly the attention of the industry pivots. Technologies will be invented to ease adoption (yay!), but people will forget that this architectural style is one part of a solution for a particular type of problem -- it is not a solution for every problem, nor does adopting it mean all of your other problems will go away.

But consultancies will rise, debates will rage and conflicts over what truly constitutes a microservice will ensue.

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conflicts over what truly constitutes a microservice will ensue.

So true. I feel like this has always been an issue in the "services" world. It's hard to nail people down on a definition that's both accurate and prescriptive. Either you end up with a definition that is so generic as to be unhelpful, or you come up with narrowly defined definitions that miss important use cases. I've decided that "services" is a word like jazz or porn or art: you know them when you see them.

My only wish is that we could, as an industry, find a way to better bootstrap our systems. We have a tendency to launch products / companies around bad ways of doing things and then spend a not inconsequential sum of money retrofitting everything.

It would be great to see tools and framework built from the ground up to address both developer productivity and scalability. It too often feels like achieving scalability comes at the cost of developer productivity... perhaps because by the time you need to scale, you've got enough resources to hire tons more developers and have them engage in menial tasks.

For sure there's a buzzwagon; and, true, microservices are just a kind of SOA (which itself wasn't new), etc.

What's different this time round is that microservice hosting should be much \cheaper\.

When you're cheap enough, all sins are forgiven.

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