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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

My favorite microservices pattern is having lots of separate little services, so you get that sweet overhead and complicated debugging, with a shared database, so you can still enjoy systemwide single points of failure and obscure side effects on data.

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I was complaining recently to a manager at another company about a half-assed "microservice breakout" project in a previous job where some teams moved from one big service + one big DB to many big services + single DB and introduced fun new DB connection + perf issues... and was dismayed to learn that this other manager didn't even think "a bunch of services all talking to the same giant DB" seemed like best practices.

Have those microservices use different patterns (language, framework, infra, etc), and outnumber your devs by a magnitude so everybody gets a piece of that sweet context switching, multiple times a day.

Last job I had to ask to confirm the number: 124 services. And it does not work very well. My team was hired to contains and replace it.

We ended up with 3 service. Exact same API is provided. It does not matter : nobody is using it anyway !

Yep.

Have also seen this coupled with the microservices pattern of having all the microservices share a large common library, with all microservices built together and deployed together all the time. All the pain of shared code across teams plus the pain of shared DB plus the pain of debugging across completely arbitrary process boundaries.

This can actually make sense when you have loosely coupled services that mostly talk to the database and external systems, and not directly to each other, that have a common domain model (due to the shared database) and common helper libraries, and that you want to be restartable separately, and/or be distributed over several hosts. Of course, the process boundaries should be well-chosen and not arbitrary.

Sounds like a cargo-culted monorepo.

Ah I am gorging myself financially on exactly that form of sweet misery.

Add to that an existing monolith that’s only been partly migrated to microservices and brother, you’ve got a stew going.

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