Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

Use the best tool for the job. It's stupid to think of monoliths vs microservices. You can use both if the problem requires it.

For example I'm currently working on an audio hosting service. The main app is a monolith where 90% of the code resides but there are a couple of ancillary services.

Audio encoding (which is heavily CPU bound) is a serverless microservice that can scale up and down as needed. Users don't upload content constantly, but when they do, you want to be able to encode stuff concurrently without blocking the main app. Audio streaming is also a serverless microservice because hey for every user uploading content you can have 1000x consumers (or more).

I think your position is basically the same position that most people that advocate for monoliths (which btw is a bit of a strawman created by microservice architecture advocates in the first place) hold. People are objecting to service/network boundaries as a default domain decomposition tool and arguing that it should be used instead when there are clear and immediate technical advantages to do so.

Yeah. Agreed. For example I need to ocr things sometimes. I literally have a process running an ocr server. It's basically a microservice.

This argument is brought forth a lot, but it misses the point. Often people think microservices are the right tool for the job, but they vastly underestimate the complexity that it entails.

> Often people think microservices are the right tool for the job, but they vastly underestimate the complexity that it entails.

And that goes 10x if deploying, monitoring, or debugging said services is Someone Else's Problem ™ I'm also cognizant that such a situation is just as much an organizational/people problem as the rest of this debate, but I have a sore spot around people making decisions where they don't have to suffer the consequences from them

If you can solve a problem without a microservice then probably it's not the right tool for the job.

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