Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "microservices" when you make internal components into services by default, instead of defaulting to making a library or class?
But if you have 20 engineers and 60 services, you're likely in a world of pain. That's not microservices, it's distributed monolith and it's the one model that doesn't work (but everyone seems to do)
The best company I worked at had about 5-10 deployable per engineers on average and it worked really well. They were small, deployed almost instantly, dependencies were straightforward, etc.
Monoliths work fine too, it's just different tradeoffs.
Though to understand why this is, you would have to know just how poorly our monolith was designed. That’s sometimes the issue with monoliths though, they allow you to “cut corners” and suddenly you end up with this huge spiderweb mess of a database that nobody knows who pulls what from because everyone has connected some sort of thing to it and now your monolith isn’t really a monolith because of it. Which isn’t how a monolith is supposed to work, but is somehow always how it ends up working anyway.
I do agree though, that the “DevOps” space for “medium-non-software-development” IT departments in larger companies is just terrible. We ended up outsourcing it, sort of, so that our regular IT operations partner (the ones which also help with networking, storage, backups, security and so on) also handle the management part of our managed Kubernetes cluster. So that once something leaves the build pipeline, it’s theirs. Which was surprisingly cheap by the way.
I do get where you’re coming from of course. If we had wanted to do it ourselves, we’d likely need to write “infrastructure as code” that was twice the size of the actual services we deploy.
I find this hard to relate to, the idea you have the discipline and culture to do microservices well if you can't do it with a monolith.
More likely is you migrate away from the monolith you never invested in fixing, and once you get to microservices you either call it a mistake and migrate back, or you have to eventually finally invest in fixing things.
Perhaps your microservice rewrite goes well because you now know your domain after building the monolith, that is another option.
If you gave me total control over everything, I’d probably build a couple of monoliths with some shared modules. But every time the data is centralised, it always somehow ends up being a total mess. With MicroServices you’ll still end up with a total mess in parts of the organisation, but at least it’ll be in something like PowerBI or even your datawarehouse and not directly in your master data.
Or to put it differently, for me MicroServices vs monoliths is all most completely an organisational question and not a technical one.
I struggle to see how microservices fix this for people; having worked primarily with them for the past 6 years.
Unless it's a shared library, which is why good microservices architecture limit the shared surface as much as possible.
This still happens with microservices though; people can still make terrible architecture decisions and standup terrible services you depend on.
Yes, by the time you get to thousands of services you hopefully have moved past the distributed monololith, if you built one.
I called ours a macrolith.
One way to mitigate the growing pains of a monolithic backend is to split it into a set of independently deployable services that communicate via APIs. The APIs decouple the services from each other by creating boundaries that are hard to violate, unlike the ones between components running in the same process
We just go from 'one' to 'too many' as equally unworkable solutions to all of our problems, and each side (and each person currently subscribed to that 'side') knows the other side is wrong. The assumption is that this means their side is right instead of reality, which is nobody is right.
The moderates are right, but their answers are wiggly and they're too busy getting stuff done to argue with the purists. But the optics are bad so here we go again on another swing of the swingset.
'Some Services' is probably right, but it varies with domain, company size, and company structure (Conway's Law). And honestly developer maturity, so while 7 may be right for me and my peers today, in a year it might be 6, or 9. There's no clever soundbite to parrot.
Going to definitely yoink it for next time I have this discussion. It applies to so many things!
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The book isn't perfect. The use of afferent and efferent terminology and some of the arbitrary methods to put numbers on decisions weren't ideal. Most of the concepts are sound. The fact that almost every decision has cost/benefit and real world implications for a living product was refreshing. That a monolith can't be cut over instantly with zero effort to a perfect system is absolutely true.
It's good food for thought for anyone considering slicing up a monolith, but maybe don't follow it to the letter.
They don't seem to understand there's a useful middleground of adding fewer, larger data services, etc. It's like SOA isn't a hot topic so people aren't aware of it.
In the end, i like the viewpoint that microservices are a deployment pattern, not so much an architecture pattern. Usually, you can draw a component diagram (containing an OrderService and a DeliveryService, etc.) and without technical details (execution environment, protocols), you couldn't tell if it's describing multiple microservices or multiple components in one service.