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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Same. I keep hearing that people have had bad experiences with microservices, but I'm not sure what those bad experiences are. I certainly don't relate to them. We had a monolith, and it devolved into a mess--managers would insist on people taking dependencies on stuff they didn't own in the name of expedience ("yeah, we'll totally circle back and do it the right way lol"). Microservices kept things neat by making dumb things hard. We were also able to deploy individual services much more frequently without needing to coordinate with a bunch of other teams, and builds, tests, etc were much faster helping shorten our iteration loops.

Local development environments were a bit more tedious in certain cases, but that was the only issue I recall.

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Microservices suck when you need to make a process faster, so you run a profiler and figure out that 90% of the workload is handling the http requests between the services.

I feel like HTTP is too heavyweight for microservices. For monoliths, it's great. And the only way to proceed in your case is to convert microservices into mini-monoliths. Particularly the authentication side, which needs to be revalidated with every request.

gRPC might be better, but supposedly so was SOAP, CORBA, DCOM, XMLRPC, and finally REST.

How does gRPC make authentication lighter-weight? Presumably you still have a token in either case which needs to be validated? There aren't many places where parsing HTTP requests is really a significant bottleneck, and I'd guess the majority of the remainder are an architectural problem (someone using a "get" endpoint in a tight loop instead of a "list" endpoint or some such).

Technically you could auth the connection using say, a custom SSL cert, and the connection isn't made unless the SSL cert is recognized.

There are other ways to do it as well where the socket connection is only authed once.

At a multibillion dollar company, local development is impossible, staging doesn't exist, most stack traces from production are truncated because the log aggregator cannot handle log entries as large as java stack traces, and most of the work involves migrating from talking to the database to talking to a microservice that exposes a single table of the database. What are joins?

At another company that was acquired by Amazon, the "user service" team (so again this is a microservice that exposes a single table of a database, this time with a two-pizza team dedicated entirely to that microservice) told us that we couldn't just query the user service when we wanted to render a page containing a username given a user id, because that was too many queries. Product demands from a VP dictated that we didn't have time to set up our own caching layer for their service (is this the responsibility of every team other than theirs?), so we shipped the feature with the usernames saved in our own DB, and now when users change their usernames the old name will appear in the pages for our feature, depending on when the pages were created.

Obligatory repost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ&ab_channel=KRAZA...

If you don’t have the skills to implement a well structured and easy to maintain monolith then you most definitely don’t have the skills to implement a distributed more complex implementation of the same system.

On the contrary. An experienced architect defines the boundaries and then the microservice architecture enforced them in a way that a monolithic architecture cannot.

On the contrary. Using libraries with clearly defined interfaces makes it easier to combine those libraries into a single executable, reducing deployment and debugging complexity. It also dramatically improves performance given the lack of intermediate encoding/decoding protocol code and TCP/UDP hops. Experienced seasoned Architects knows this and work hard to remove unnecessary distributed complexity from systems they design. While “beginner experts” always pick the most complex “solution” for the job at hand. The worst spaghetti code I have ever seen in my 30+ year career is a 20+ years old Microservices architecture. So I can’t wait to read the future “We had a problem so we chose micro-services. Now we have N distributed problems + K impossible to debug obscure timing issues” articles.

My 2c is that an experience architect would know that it would be ideal if they could do this and be right, but in practice they aren't likely to get those boundaries correct up-front and it takes time and experience working in the domain to see what those boundaries truly ought to be. Also, it's perfectly possible for monolithic applications to enforce boundaries as strict as microservices do via a "modular monolith" approach where the domain contracts are marked as public, but all the domain logic is marked as internal, and a framework of sorts enforces that each module only has access to either it's own schema in a shared database, or it's own separate database.

These days I think that's actually where everything should start off. With a good implementation of this you can transition relatively painlessly to a distributed system, and in the initial phases the simplicity of the build/test/deploy cycle massively lowers the overhead compared to a microservices approach while the strong isolation of domain logic gives you the ability to reason about changes to your domain not affecting other areas of the system.

Having worked in both small companies with terrible monoliths, small companies with terrible microservices, big companies with terrible monoliths and big companies with semi-decent microservices, and then implementing a modular monolith myself, I've seen enough to know that it's a solid, solid starting point. Most companies are pretty small, and the difference between an engineering org of 40 engineers trying microservices vs an engineering org of 4000 engineers doing microservices is on such a different level that people who haven't experienced both likely can't appreciate the data point that they're missing.

I love the strong isolation that microservices provide, and they can be super beneficial, but done at the wrong scale, the wrong level of technical maturity, or the wrong time and they're a huge drag. By the same token a monolith that grows too large for too long is equally a drag, but it's one that's exponentially more tolerable in an engineering org of 40 engineers than it is an engineering org of 4000 engineers. The key thing isn't which architecture you pick, it's the ability to be able to transition and adapt at the right point in time. Modular monoliths buy you this opportunity at a fraction of the price and for much less risk.

100% agree. You can write bad code using both Monoliths and Microservices. However Microservices are inherently more complex and slower than Monoliths (because of the added encoding/decoding and network overhead).

I think the critical aspect of whether or not you need them and hence whether or not they represent a good set of trade-offs, is on what dimensions are you optimizing for.

My previous employer was a small engineering org of around 40 engineers with a monolith of below average quality, trying to go in a microservices direction and not really having that pan out a great deal due to being unable to spare the engineering bandwidth to invest enough in managing the complexity while still having to deal with the monolith.

My current employer is an engineering org of around 4000 engineers that one two headed monolith that makes up the original product (web app + api share some code and are monoliths in their own right) and also very successfully uses microservices for everything else and there is a lot of them.

At my previous employer dealing with the monolith was fine even though the code was rather horrid, and we would release twice a week. The "microservices" I wound up building/working on there were not worth the overhead / complexity added at all and we would have been far, far, far better off investing in cleaning up the monolith to make it safer/easier to work in.

At my current employer dealing with the monolith is not fine. You have to book releases in a calendar, it's scary, it's giant, and despite multiple releases of it per day, there are so many other teams that book releases for it that you have to queue up to get your turn and it's done that way for safety. Yes, we also use feature flagging too. It's also vastly more difficult to know/find who you have to communicate with about changes to the monoliths because unlike a tiny engineering org, that information simply doesn't fit in your head. Here, the microservices we own are awesome in comparison. They are small code bases that are easy to reason about, our organization invested a massive amount in the technical maturity needed to operate, maintain, and be able to handle the complexity, and we have continuous deployment pipelines that mean we can safely release multiple times per day and when PRs are merged they are shipped all the way through to production in around 15 minutes.

So, when you say "more complex and slower" you have to ask yourself "than what?" There is no "one is better than the other", there is only "every tool is the right tool for some job" and "every tool is also the wrong tool for almost any other job it was not designed for" and your job is to understand exactly what tool your specific situation actually calls for.

This is why I like modular monoliths as a starting point, as they're essentially a multi-tool. A half-way compromise which is not as easy to use as a full-blown dedicated tool, but is versatile enough that if it's the only tool you have and you have no idea what job you're going to need to do, then you've probably made an adequate choice regardless of what the situation calls for in the end. And if you outgrow your multi-tool, you can much more easily swap it out for a set of it's dedicated equivalents.

This is probably true if you have good engineering discipline in the monolith case such that your team adheres to good architecture. In the microservices case, as long as your architect is competent, you can draw sane lines between components and it's dramatically harder for IDGAF managers and developers to violate them. Everywhere I've worked, the microservices approach ends up being considerably simpler precisely because it makes it difficult to do things that are probably bad ideas in the first place (it's the same concept with static typing, by the way--a sufficiently smart team may not need explicit types, but in practice most teams aren't sufficiently smart, and the types function as rails to keep people from doing dumb things). Every place I've worked, the network and complexity overheads are paid for many times over by the simplicity and performance of preventing people from doing dumb things.

It's also worth noting that microservices are more secure and reliable as well, since there's no vulnerable component that has access to all of the secrets nor a bunch of components that ought to be non-critical but actually are critical because anything can bring down the entire application for all other components (e.g., someone makes a sync call in some leaf component that breaks the event loop for the whole application, with failures cascading across your replicas).

>It's also worth noting that microservices are more secure and reliable as well, since there's no vulnerable component that has access to all of the secrets nor a bunch of components that ought to be non-critical but actually are critical because anything can bring down the entire application for all other components (e.g., someone makes a sync call in some leaf component that breaks the event loop for the whole application, with failures cascading across your replicas

This is not inherently true. Whether it's true or not is down to your implementation. You can most certainly have reliability and security problems while doing microservices.

> This is not inherently true. Whether it's true or not is down to your implementation. You can most certainly have reliability and security problems while doing microservices.

Obviously I didn't claim "you cannot have reliability or security problems while doing microservices".

> Same. I keep hearing that people have had bad experiences with microservices, but I'm not sure what those bad experiences are. I certainly don't relate to them.

Likewise. When I see people complaining about microservices, more often what I see is actually poorly thought-through strawmen aimed at distributed systems, which boil down to "having to do network requests is bad".

I wonder why attacking the "microservices" buzzword gets these people on rage mode but the sight of a web app calling a dozen APIs somehow doesn't make them bat an eye.

That sounds like a "True Scotsman" argument. The fact is that microservices are inherently and objectively more complex than Monoliths. So if you can't build a well engineered Monolith then you are pretty much guaranteed to build an even worse Microservices system (because you now have the added encoding/decoding, network hops, latency and timing issues, no guaranteed data consistency, no global commit guarantees etc. etc. etc.)

I can believe that monoliths have a lower theoretical complexity floor than microservice architectures, but I don't think any shops are coming close to that theoretical complexity floor irrespective of their architecture, so we need to think about the actual, practical complexity of applications in each architecture.

Specifically, I think the strong boundaries between components better facilitates maintainability--as with dynamic typing, the absence of rails allows people to more easily make bad decisions. In the case of monoliths, this usually looks like an inexperienced developer (especially at the bequest of an unscrupulous manager who swears that we will definitely not do this again and will fix in a subsequent release) taking a dependency on another system's private internals. In other words, I assert that given a good architect and an average team, a microservice architecture will be less complex than a monolith despite marshaling data over a network. In order to have a well-engineered monolith, you need good architects and a good team (no unscrupulous managers who are empowered to compromise the architecture in the name of expedience).

> no guaranteed data consistency, no global commit guarantees

You don't get these for free with monoliths either. I've seen a lot of monoliths choc full of race conditions which don't manifest during development (small contrived test cases running on unburdened systems). Paradoxically, because microservices have to marshal data over a network, these consistency issues are more likely to appear. Moreover, people who work on microservices are more likely to think about race conditions precisely because the system is distributed (indeed, the architects think about this stuff when they lay out the interfaces).

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