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Comment by rbranson | Hacker News Reader

(Former Facebook employee)

The VAST majority of online serving code at Facebook is written in Hack (PHP) and is part of a gigantic codebase called fbwww. Backend services that do heavy lifting (mostly search, feed ranking, ad matching, TAO, various caches, proxies, etc) are fairly light on business logic and written in C++.

It isn't a microservices architecture at all: they only move stuff to C++ for latency and efficiency reasons. For instance most of the ad stack is written in Hack, but certain key pieces use C++ for better performance. I'm not aware of any Java or Go code that is part of the online serving stack.

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Do you know of any place actually using microservices at scale ? ( 400 Million + users )

Your definition of "at scale" doesn't seem to leave room for Amazon, Netflix, or Uber (all in tens to low hundreds of million monthly active users according to a cursory Google search) but... those.

Guess my perspective of scale is different.

Its just an observation of having worked on systems at scale and I dont see the microservices / containers used.

I am curious if anyone else has.

The more I am around containers and the network complexity/issues that are created the less I am convinced it is the most optimal way and I am looking for opinions that differ from mine so I can learn

In my experience, these issues are minor when your large company has an infrastructure team dedicated to the service substrate (CI, self-service incremental deploys, service discovery and routing, standard RPC layer, canonical repository of IDL files, standard messaging layer, persistent storage as a service, time series collection, dashboarding, alerting, distributed tracing, safe internal and external nginx configs, etc).

Microservices are probably a bad idea (for now) if you aren't large enough for such a team.

But you've constructed your question to exclude the companies that work this way, which I think any reasonable person would call "at scale."

Only about 3.2 million people have the internet (as of 2015). Your definition of scale is 12.5% of the entire connected world or more?

This is like the guy in these threads saying $400k a year for a software engineer is "market rate" and/or "easily achievable."

Counting website users isn't a great metric for Amazon because a lot of the traffic is from AWS. But Amazon has been successfully running on a service oriented architecture for about 15 years now.

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