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A company I worked at went all in on option c - there was a random number service (that just wrapped a random number generation library), and sending an email was split across multiple services - one to pull the email request from the database, one to generate the email from the template, one to actually send the email and one to save the templated email to the database.

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I’m imagining that whomever is running that company prefers to heat his home by throwing cash directly into his fireplace instead of burning wood.

How did it work out? Very curious, as such granularity of deployable units seems absurd unless it's deployed into a single runtime...

In reality it worked - each service only talked to the next so in that sense it was okay. But each service was its own binary running in its own container (someone went to a conference and heard that S3 was made up of 500 microservices, to they decided we needed as many microservices as possible). The bit where it didn't work so well was making changes and testing those changes - the original developers hacked it together then didn't want to touch it after that, so there was no dev environment (just staging environments to hijack) and no functional/e2e tests.

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