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Comment by altmind | Hacker News Reader

>> At HelloFresh we run hundreds of microservices that do everything from supply chain management and handling payments to saving customer preferences. Running microservices at scale is not without its own challenges and many companies are beginning to experience the pain of complexity.

Lets solve this problem by introducing another level of indirection and not solving the root cause(?).

At this point i really believe that software architects who don't code, don't belong to this industry. If the implementers and operators are suffering, there should be a feedback channel.

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Indeed, it is another level of indirection, and I’m all for it (having introduced a custom service mesh based on envoy into the company I work for having ~100 microservices, though it took more like 2-3 months of me working solo).

It’s a great way to get a uniform metrics and troubleshooting experience.

Most important though, especially if you have strategically compiled binaries as microservices, a service mesh lets you roll out improved routing logic easily because it’s all abstracted away, not encoded in client libraries in X number of languages. Same for tracing. Wanna add a field to all traces being generated? Go recompile and redeploy a 100 services... or change one service mesh config.

Other than that, envoy can usually withstand much more traffic than the service it overlays, so you can use it to provide DoS protection in depth, by limiting on service proxies everywhere. Saved us a couple outage escalations already.

>> Other than that, envoy can usually withstand much more traffic than the service it overlays

services-to-service peer-to-peer communication creates problems on its own. and i dont even know what are the benefits. it does not guarantee you anything per-se. all the redundancy and bandwith improvements need to be... coded... like with any other approach.

I think this is and underlying feature of replacing DevOps with SRE is they start out as software engineers and move into a more operations focused role removes the whole don't code issue.

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