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Comment by nevinera | Hacker News Reader

That's technical, and not architectural. I'm _all about_ technical solutions to lack of discipline, and in fact I think technical and process solutions are the only immediate way to create cultural solutions (which are the long-term ones). I'd even consider minor increases to architectural complexity for that purpose justifiable - it's a real problem, and trading to solve it is reasonable.

But architectural complexity has outsized long-term cost, and service-orientation in particular has a _lot_ of it. And in this particular case, it doesn't actually solve the problem, since you _can't_ successfully enforce those domain boundaries unless you already have them well-defined.

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Can you explain the salient distinction between a "technical" versus "architectural" solution? Candidly, I'm not convinced that there is one.

> But architectural complexity has outsized long-term cost

As do technical solutions, of course. CI/CD systems are very expensive, just from a monetary perspective, but also impose significant burdens to developers in terms of blocking PRs, especially if there are flaky or expensive tests.

> And in this particular case, it doesn't actually solve the problem, since you _can't_ successfully enforce those domain boundaries unless you already have them well-defined.

Ignoring microservices, just focusing on underlying SoA for a moment, the boundary is the process. That is an enforceable boundary. I think what you're saying amounts to, in microservice parlance, that there is no way to prevent a single microservice from crossing multiple bounded contexts, that it ultimately relies on developers. This is true, but it's also just as true for good monolithic designs around modules - there is no technical constraint for a module to not expand into domains, becoming cluttered and overly complex.

Microservices do not make that problem harder, but SoA does give you a powerful technical tool for isolation.

> Can you explain the salient distinction between a "technical" versus "architectural" solution? Candidly, I'm not convinced that there is one.

Not concisely in the general case, but in this case the difference is fairly straightforward - CI/CD doesn't affect the structure of your executing application at all, only the surrounding context. I don't want to spend the hours it would take to characterize architecture as distinct from implementation, but the vast number of textbooks on the topic all generally agree that there is one, though they draw the lines in slightly different places.

> I think what you're saying amounts to,

Very much no - my point is about the process of implementation. The services.. _do_ enforce boundaries, but the boundaries they enforce may not be good ones.

In order to successfully extract services from a monolith, you have to go through a process that includes finding and creating those domain boundaries for the domain being extracted. If it's your first time, you might be doing that implicitly and without realizing it's what you're doing, but under the hood it's the bulk of the mental effort.

The part where you actually _introduce a service_ can be anywhere from a tenth to half of the work (that fraction varies a lot by technical stack and depending on how coupled the domain in question is to the central behavioral tangle in the monolith), but by the time you've gotten the domain boundary created you've _already solved_ the original problem. Now you're facing a trade of "extract this well-factored domain out to a separate service application, to prevent its now-clear boundaries from being violated in the future". And I contend that that's a trade that should rarely be made.

Which is exactly why the real challenges around (micro) services is to a large extent an organisational challenge mixed how those boundaries are belonging to which business capabilities.

The technical part of services is easy enough really but if the organisation leaks its boundaries, which always flow downstream into the actual teams, you are proper fucked.

It takes a different level of maturity, both in organisation and team, to build a service oriented software.

That's my experience at least.

Right! What I'm fundamentally saying is that the majority of orgs trying to adopt SOA are doing it for the wrong reasons, and will deeply regret it. In general, the "right way" to adopt SOA is to extract services one at a time because you have to, to solve various problems you've encountered (scaling problems, technical problems, stability issues), and then realize that you are in fact currently using a service-oriented architecture, and have been for several years.

I would hope that there is more process in place protecting against downtime than code review - for example automated tests across several levels, burn-in testing, etc.

People are not reliable enough to leave them as the only protection against system failure...

Did you mean to reply to somebody else? I'm a huge believer in automated testing, and if I said something that can be interpreted otherwise I'd like to clarify it.

I guess the GP's issue is because automated tests (and every other kind of validation) imposes architectural constraints on your system, and thus are an exception to your rule.

I don't think that rule can be applied as universally as you stated it. But then, I have never seen anybody breaking it in a bad way that did also break it in a good way, so the people that need to hear it will have no problem with the simplified version until they grow a bit.

Anyway, that problem is very general of software development methods. Almost every one of them is contextual. And people start without the maturity to discern the context from the advice, so they tend to overgeneralize what they see.

Hm. I think maybe you're using "system" to mean a different thing than I am? I thinking of "the system" as the thing that is executing in production - it provides the business behavior we are trying to provide; there is a larger "system" surrounding it, that includes the processes and engineers, and the CI/CD pipelines - it too has an "architecture", and _that_ architecture gets (moderately) more complex when you add CI/CD. Is that where our communication is clashing?

Because the complexity of that outer system is also important, but there are a few very major differences between the two that are probably too obvious to belabor. But in general, architectural complexity in the inner system costs a lot more than it does in the outer system, because it's both higher churn (development practices change much slower than most products) and higher risk (taking production systems offline is much less permissible than freezing deployments)

> I think maybe you're using "system" to mean a different thing than I am?

No, I'm not. Are you overlooking some of the impacts of your tests and most of the impact of static verification?

Those do absolutely impact your system, not only your environment. For tests it's good to keep those impacts at a minimum (for static verification you want to maximize them), but they still have some.

I don't think I'm overlooking any major ones, but we are probably working in quite different types of systems - I'm not aware of any type of static verification I'd use in a rails application that would affect _architecture_ in a meaningful way (unless I would write quite terrifying code without the verifier I suppose).

I'm not sure about the tests - it depends on what you'd consider an impact possibly; I've been trained by my context to design code to be decomposable in a way that _is_ easily testable, but I'm not sure that is really an 'impact of the tests' (and I'm fairly confident that it makes the abstractions less complex instead of more).

Would you mind explaining what you mean in more detail?

Agreed. isn't that why strongly typed languages made a comeback?

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