You can get all that with a monolith server and a Postgres backend.
But for management, it's completely different. It's all about managing complexity on an organizational level. It's so much easier to think in terms "Team 1 is in charge of microservice A". And I know from experience that it works decently enough, at least in some orgs with competent management.
I think that's the first time I've heard any "techie" say we use containers because of reliability or zero-downtime deployments, those feel like they have nothing to do with each other, and we've been building reliable server-side software with zero-downtime deployments long before containers became the "go-to", and if anything it was easier before containers.
Deploys usually took minutes (unless something was broken), scaling worked the same as if you were using anything else, increase a number and redeploy, and no Kubernetes, Docker or even containers as far as the eye could see.
I know: it’s ridiculous to have an architectural barrier for an organizational reason, and the cost of a bad slice multiplies. I still think in some situations, that is better to the gas-station-bathroom effect of shared codebases.
But why is this natural? I’m not saying we shouldn’t have network RPC, but it’s not obvious to me that we should have only network RPC when there are cheap local IPC mechanisms.
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil. But premature pessimisation is not a good thing either. You should keep options open, unless you have a good reason not to do so.
If your IPC involves moving gigabytes of transient data between components, may be it's a good thing to use shared memory. But usually that's not required.
This is somewhat common in containerisation where e.g. Kubernetes lets you set up sidecars for logging and so on, but I suspect it could go a lot further. Many microservices aren't doing big fan-out calls and don't require much in the way of hardware.
That’s what I was referring to, sorry for the inaccurate adjective.
Most people try to split a monolith in domains, move code as libraries, or stuff like that - but IMO you rarely avoid a shared space importing the subdomains, with blurry/leaky boundaries, and with ownership falling between the cracks.
Micro services predispose better to avoid that shared space, as there is less expectation of an orchestrating common space. But as you say the cost is ridiculous.
I think there’s an unfilled space for an architectural design that somehow enforces boundaries and avoids common spaces as strongly as microservices do, without the physical separation.
But that doesn't warrant its use in smaller organizations, or for smaller deployments.
Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Then suddenly one realises that techies can also be bad at management.
Management of a container environment not only requires deployment skills but also documentational and communication skills. Suddenly it’s not management rather the techie that can't manage their tech stack.
This pointing of fingers at management is rather repetitive and simplistic but also very common.
If your business can afford irregular downtime, by all means, go for it. Otherwise, you'll need to take precautions, and that will invariably make the system more complex than that.
And if certain servers do get very important you just run a backup server with VPS and switch over DNS (even if you keep a high ttl, most servers update within minutes nowadays) or if you want to be fancy throw a load balancer in front of it.
If you solve issues in a few minutes people are always thankful, and most dont notice. With complicated setups it tends to take much longer before figuring out what the issue is in the first place.
Also in 5 years of working on both microservicy systems and monoliths, not once has these things you describe been a problem for me. Everything I've hosted in Azure has been perfectly available pretty much all the time unless a developer messed up or Azure itself has downtime that would have taken down either kind of app anyway.
But sure let's make our app 100 times more complicated because maybe some time in the next 10 years the complexity might save us an hour of downtime. I'd say it's more likely the added complexity will cause more downtime than it saves.
I don't think I implied that microservices are the solution, really. You can have a replicated monolith, but that absolutely adds complexity of its own.
> But sure let's make our app 100 times more complicated because maybe some time in the next 10 years the complexity might save us an hour of downtime.
Adding replicas and load balancing doesn't have to be a hundred times more complex.
> I'd say it's more likely the added complexity will cause more downtime than it saves.
As I said before, this is an assessment you will need to make for your use case, and balance uptime requirements against your complexity budget; either answer is valid, as long as you feel confident with it. Only a Sith believes in absolutes.
As your business needs grow, you can start layering complexity on top. The point is you don't start at 11 with a overly complex architecture.
In your example, if your server crashes, just make sure you have some sort of automatic restart. In practice that may mean a downtime of seconds for your 12 users. Is that more complexity? Sure - but not much. If you need to take your service down for maintenance, you notify your 12 users and schedule it for 2am ... etc.
Later you could create a secondary cluster and stick a load-balancer in-front. You could also add a secondary replicated PostgreSQL instance. So the monolith/postgres architecture can actually take you far as your business grows.
It is common for founding engineers to start with a preexisting way of working that they import from their previous more-scaled company, and that approach is refined and compounded over time
It does mean starting with more than is necessary at the start, but that doesn't mean it has to be particularly complex. It means you start with heaps of already-solved problems that you simply never have to deal with, allowing focus on the product goals and deep technical investments that need to be specific to the new company
(Sarcasm)
Sarcasm doesn't work online, If I write something like "Donald Trump is the best president ever" you don't have any way of knowing whether I'm being sarcastic or I'm just really really stupid. Only people who know me can make that judgement, and basically nobody on here knows me. So I either have to avoid sarcasm or make it clear that I'm being sarcastic.