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Comment by tlarkworthy | Hacker News Reader

I love the catagorization. But decent software should be distributed. I dislike single teams that begat 10s of miscroservices, but it should be buy, not build, features from specialized 3rd parties. Thus a decent modern installation should be leaning on a ton of 3rd party services (e.g. Identity providers, databases, caches) because they all do a better job than the hand rolled local one. It's how you outsource expertise.

The vision of the service mesh is to make unreliability and security no longer the job if the application binary. Even without a service mesh, you can put a lot of common functionality into a reverse proxy. Personally I am loving OpenResty for the simplicity of writing adapters and oauth at the proxy layer with good performance.

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I think it should be possible to buy or use software from third parties. One thing I'm disappointed about and think we need better tools to avoid is the fact that third parties provide their tools as services rather than libraries. There's reasons they do that, deploying a library that all your customers can easily use is hard right now, but there's no reason it has to be that way.

Some things can't easily be libraries like databases, but other things like some caches, miscellaneous operations like image resizing (depending on an architecture that can handle the load on those servers), and a bunch of other things could just be libraries.

> Some things can't easily be libraries like databases

The world's most widely deployed database engine (SQLite) is only available as a library.

The worlds most trafficked database is probably Google search* index and its not sqlite and it's certainly distributed.

* Maybe Facebook, I dunno, the point stands.

Modern browsers all use sqllite, so more than 90% of user accessing that index are doing through an app using sqllite. Lot’s of things come with sqllite without you knowing about it

Good point, though the Google index users are 1. the google search users AND 2. the machine crawlers who crawl webpages no-one visits. I am not sure the human users of the index are the majority.

Admittedly this is a fairly pedantic point.

The world is distributed. Money is distributed. You need services to interact with the world. The large portion of useful business services cannot be encapsulated into a hermetic library.

If you think that distributed service clients as libraries is enough to solve the issue of distributed computing, that is incorrect as most of the same distributed systems crap will still happen.

Totally agree. I have found that all of the pain points OP article mentions, are things that still crop up in monoliths, and by hardening against them, the app is more antifragile. Ex:

Fragile: writing fault tolerant (because the endpoint is unreliable) hedges against the case when unforseen conditions throw a spanner into the works.

Async/Laggy: some operations just take longer. Being able to gracefully route control flow around blockages improves performance.

Pipes: I've found it's helpful to have ser/de interfaces throughout the program, as it forces you to use immutable data structures - aka functional programming. This helps reduce state space.

Put together, I find having various "shear lines" in a monolith codebase, where I could split into a service if I wanted, greatly improves robustness.

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