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Comment by cagataygurturk | Hacker News Reader

Maybe my ignorance, but do they have services like left-pad-as-a microservice? I can't understand which 1000 microservices you can derive for a cab-renting application.

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I used to work in startups, and wondered this all the time. Then I joined a big valley tech company, and now I understand.

It's because they hire smart and ambitious people, but give them a tiny vertical to work on. It's a person level problem, not a technical one in my opinion.

I think you solve this by designing your stack and then hiring meticulously, instead of HIRE ALL THE ENGINEERS and then figure it out (which is quite obviously uber's problem)

  left-pad-as-a microservice

You can also have another service to monitor the left-pad service.

And one to aggregate its logs.

And another to monitor whether the logs are being aggregated.

And yet another one to ensure that the log-aggregation-monitoring-service is working.

Our grandpa's were running banks with 20 cobol programmers, they were not even calling themselves engineers

And it took 1-3 nights to settle.

And another to redirect the misspelled first attempt "left-padd-as-service" API calls to the new one

I'm not sure if it's ignorance that leads people to dismiss things they don't understand so much as it is a coping mechanism similar to that which gave birth to various religions. Ignorance just lets it thrive after the birth.

Phrasing aside, it's a legitimate question. I've worked at a really really large web behemoth serving orders of magnitude more users and many many unique and disparate products (as opposed to a handful products that Uber serves). If I counted all of their production related services, I'm not sure they'd amount to anywhere close to 1700. Now I know "microservices" is the new hotness, but surely there are limits to human cognition that limit the total number of moving pieces any team can manage without maintaining a constant state of crisis.

It'll be interesting to know the number of people oncall at any given time and the number of prod alerts per hour/day/week.

I have heard of, but never witnessed, groups where the team stays together but cycles through projects a sprint at a time. One or two teams keeping three or four projects spinning but making the projects take turns.

I don't know if they provide popcorn at the meetings where the project managers explain why they deserve the next sprint.

Nonsense. libc? A microservice for every function call! Surely if you can wrap your head around a library you can wrap it around a thousand little microservices.

(Snark exists in this comment.)

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