Comment by skytreader | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skytreader | Hacker News Reader

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> You can store code for different purposes in the same source tree. You can deploy something that is built from just one part of the source tree.

At the risk of sounding memetic, the question is not so much "Can you?" but "Should you?". Should you store a monolithic application across multiple repositories? Should you store a distributed application in a monolithic repository?

I agree with @likortera that you should not. And that's because...

> The way you store your source code doesn't have much to do with how your system is deployed.

I disagree with this statement.

Your architecture (monolithic vs distributed) imposes certain assumptions on other aspects of your distribution pipeline. Your workflow (in this discussion "how you store your source code") should support these assumptions, not hinder them.

For example, one benefit of microservices is that cross-functional teams can develop independently of each other. And yet one cited advantage of monorepos is that everyone is on the same version of dependencies all the time. In short, your teams are not independent after all.

Note that I'm keeping the example extremely generic to illustrate this inconsistency, a conflict of interest if you will, that I see people commit in this topic, because in my experience, these questions are not purely technical but involves product/business factors as well. Maybe for most of the people (operative emphasis on "MAYBE", because who am I to judge you), the discussion they need to have first is whether or not they are using the right architecture for their product in the first place.

If you choose to have a microservices architecture, you have to live with the fact that your teams/services will operate at different cadences. If you feel the need to impose a One True Library Version All the Time, then go for a monolithic architecture, and store your code in the same way.

Two things.

One, teams that share a dependency version can still develop independently; they just share something in common. They already likely share other things in common: deployment target OS, cloud platform and services, shared authN/authZ frameworks, etc.

Two, a monorepo is just the SCM mechanism. As the parent was describing, it doesn't prescribe anything other than the code storage location and how branching, committing, etc. works. Yes, a lot of organizations prefer having a single version rule in their individual monorepos, but nothing about monorepos in general makes this a requirement. You can use multiple versions of the same dependency and still gain advantages from the single commit benefits, and even famous instances like Google's have exceptions where this is the case.

> a monorepo is just the SCM mechanism ... it doesn't prescribe anything other than the code storage location and how branching, committing, etc. works

That's not really the case in practice. When people decide to choose mono vs multi based on their benefits, it's become a workflow philosophy in itself. If you choose a monorepo approach but use multiple versions of the same (in-house) dependency across components, you are just opening yourself up for a world of confusion. Sure, you can do it, but should you? Why choose a monorepo structure if you won't take advantage of its benefits?

> teams that share a dependency version can still develop independently; they just share something in common

My point about team independence doesn't mean they should not share anything at all. But rather, they now _update_ together at the same pace because the "atomic commit" that updated a dependency also updated my team's usage of said dependency, for better and for worse. My team might have a reason not to update just yet.

Spot on!

One of the companies I worked for, had the brilliant idea of putting EVERYTHING related to UI/frontend in a monorepo, where almost every single file or two were a different package. I used to joke there were more package.json files than actual js files (it was almost true).

I spent months saying this thing was a terrible idea. Nonetheless the "frontend infrastructure" folks wanted to do some CV padding and play with Lerna and their SV friend's cloud CI service startup, so they went ahead with it.

Months later the big problems started, among which one of the main ones was that they were pushing through every team's throats updates, breaking the product/features those teams were working on, disrupting their roadmaps, accusing each other's of low test coverage, doing hacks and workarounds, shit tons of crazy CI scripts for all the corner cases, much longer deploy times, most dev environments were a lot slower, deployment issues because now we had to deploy several different projects at the same time, etc, and of course not being able to upgrade to latest React because some team in the corner had an issue with it and they didn't have the time at the moment to fix it.

How did they solve all of this? In the span of 3 to 4 months they left the company. All four of them. Leaving behind an incredible amount of technical debt and nearly every frontend team totally fucked up.

What irks me is that some of these guys are pretty popular "youtubers" and spend their days giving talks of how great their work with monorepos and "frontend infra" is. They don't tell the messes they've caused of course.

Monorepos might be great if you're Google and have the resources and talent to do it right. For most companies out there, it is just creating a centralized problem that will eventually block everyone.

I'm a big proponent of monoliths, specially while you're not a > 300 person company. But if you're splitting your teams and services, then agree on APIs, don't break them, and let each team follow their own pace, with their own tools, and with their own schedules and preferences. Otherwise stick to the good ol' monolith and just separate things into modules/imports/whatever.

At my current employer, the main application has a "plugins" system with a very flexible and stable API. Every team around is just building "plugins" that can be installed into the main monolith, depending on each customer needs. This works fantastically well for a company with more than 1k engineers. No monorepos, no coupling, no interdependencies between teams, no parallel deploys, and each team manages their own destiny more or less.

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