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Comment by eterpstra | Hacker News Reader

Wait, who am I supposed to believe here?!? Prime Video tore down their micro services in favor of a monolith just last year! Which trillion dollar globocorp is my tiny, insignificant company supposed to emulate?

https://thenewstack.io/return-of-the-monolith-amazon-dumps-m...

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If you read the Prime Video blog post the takeaway is definitely not "always use a monolith". I haven't used Step Functions but they specifically mention step functions with a lot of state transitions (and the pricing model is per state transitions) and storing things in S3 and having to access things there all the time (which I've used S3 before and I was a bit shocked by since it seemed obvious to me that was gonna be really expensive). The takeaway for me was it's important to actually understand the tools that you're using.

As an aside the Prime video article as a bit funny, at one point they have the line (which I hope is sarcastic but I fear that it isn't) "We experimented and took a bold decision: we decided to rearchitect our infrastructure" when their original design just obviously chose tools that didn't fit their workflow.

And just to add: that decision (to start with serverless for your POCs) came from above, CTO level.

Needless to say, microservices are not serverless/step functions.

> The takeaway for me was it's important to actually understand the tools that you're using.

no no no, that takes time, the hype train doesn't wait for anyone. the sacred monolith it is. all hail the Monolith! crush the microgerms, destroy the filthy tiny services.

They're pretty clear here on what the benefits are. Microservices allow you to scale up and down individual system components without having to carry along the rest of a vertically scaled monolith for the ride. This makes for more efficient utilization of compute resources. For a company renting compute resources from the cloud, like Netflix, this can save a lot of money.

What Amazon did, according to this needlessly snarky article that is not Amazon's tech blog, does not conflict with this. It's all theory. In reality, you should not be dogmatic and religious about your architecture choices, but empirical wherever possible. They measured utilization and cost and found they could do better in some cases with monolithic sub-systems. This doesn't mean all of Prime Video abandoned SOA.

> This makes for more efficient utilization of compute resources.

No it doesn't. The rest of the monolith is just a chunk in your compiled binary sitting on disk, which is trivial in terms of resource cost. If that code is not running, it is not using any runtime resources.

Microservices will, however, greatly increase resource requirements if they lead to additional serialization/deserialization, which is relatively expensive. If you're doing video encoding, this isn't such a big deal. For web services, it is likely to be the bulk of the resource cost. This is only exacerbated in modern infrastructures where services are more and more expected to use TLS to talk to each other.

Swapping out silicon calls for network calls is the definition of complicated...And starting complicated because you want to achieve some premature optimization is insane. Monoliths are preferable for 90% of the use cases that you see in public or private industries.

Honestly, I get that it somehow became cool to ignore the grammatically correct "computation" and "computational resources" in favor of just grunting "compute" — why not go all the way?

"efficient utility of compute resources", etc. Just shorthand everything.

Does it take a famous developer to do it first for everyone to feel comfortable doing it?

IIRC The Prime Video guys were processing videos using AWS step functions - which probably makes sense if you are processing a few videos every so often. If you are processing videos continuously then it’s much more cost effective to just have some big boxes running 24x7 crunching through a queue of jobs.

The meta takeaway is that you shouldn't be afraid to resist trends (in either direction: monolith or microservices). If you're 'wrong' today, you may be 'right' in 5 years.

My problem with these two articles is neither provide sufficient detail to learn anything meaningful.

Are there any good resources from trillion dollar globocorps that get down into the weeds?

AirBnB comes to mind. https://airbnb.io

Yeah, I've always been impressed at AirBnB's open source stuff, even if I don't use their actual product.

I watch ThePrimagen (coding content creator on YouTube/Twich) from time to time, and he works as an engineer at Netflix.

My impression seems to be that he doesn't like the container infrastructure, reflecting my own opinion, though he never calls out explicitly the infrastructure at Netflix as something bad. But every time he talks about work at Netflix, sounds about as complex as I'd image if I'd give the job to a CV driven engineer.

Netflix is huge, has wide breadth of activities, needs to move terabytes of video around, and so has a lot of essential complexity.

"Micro service" and "Monolith" don't have precise definitions anyway. Ideally, there's only one right architecture: the one that's sufficient for the problem at hand, all things considered (latency, availability, cost, provider, maintenance, conceptual integrity, ...).

I feel like the term "microservice" is open to misinterpretation (people tend to focus on the micro part a bit much; I remember someone waxing poetic about something like a csv parsing service they had). But surely monolith is quite unambiguous: a system which is deployed as a whole. That is, you cannot deploy some part of the system on its own. You want to get changes in part X to prod? Better be prepared to deploy A through W and Y and Z as well.

That feels fairly precise. But maybe some folks would disagree with this definition of a monolith.

Be thankful. That madness is what feeding a lot of families. Yours maybe one of those.

Mine is definitely one of those.

They moved one of their use-cases back to a monolith, not their whole suite of applications/services.

IIRC, the rebuild to monolith doesn't tell the whole story. They aren't ditching all of their microservices in favor of monolith. There is a person responsible from Prime giving a clear picture of this in twitter (sadly I'm not saving the tweet source)

Well .. which one is better for your chances to get more money in the performance review?

I was highly commended for bringing up 6 new microservices a year ago during my performance review. Late during development I noticed that at least 2 of them were useless (they are essentially message routing gateways, I planned to "enrich" messages from inside, but ultimately never did). It was already done and I did not want to waste time to integrate those two services into the others so I left it as is and, well, my boss loved it.

> Which trillion dollar globocorp is my tiny, insignificant company supposed to emulate?

None. They have a different set of problems than you.

I mean you could just read a variety of different sources, look at the different trade-offs, and make informed decisions based on the compromises of both different architectural designs and your own products’ needs?

Jesus the quality of conversation here is not good today.

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