Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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> Refactoring across the call stack is orders of magnitude easier than refactoring across a socket.

Yes.

> Sacrificial or not, you can still write the Monolith as "Service Oriented", just that boundary is the call stack.

Or just "modular". Obviously you should always make things as modular as you can, but at some point there are irreducible logical dependencies where increased modularity decreases cohesion more than it helps anything else.

Certainly it's a good to strive for the ideal, but at the end of the day a "service-oriented" monolith is not going to enforce the architecture the way a true SoA will. It's sort of like Haskell's purity guarantee—you can write functional code in a lot of languages, but the benefits you reap from having a compiler's guarantee of a certain code's purity is an order of magnitude more useful than browbeating a team of cats to always follow the style guide, because no matter how good your training your "guarantee" is always subject to human error.

> at the end of the day a "service-oriented" monolith is not going to enforce the architecture the way a true SoA will

This is true.

However, even with that enforcement, those guarantees don't prevent you from implementing a bad architecture. And unless you're a domain expert on the project and a general SoA expert, you will most likely get it wrong on the first attempt.

You must know what your boundaries are before separating functionality into services. Practicing SoA may guarantee that you do SoA correctly, but it introduces significant overhead if you get those initial boundaries wrong.

It's more like how Haskell will guarantee you write pure functions, but won't guarantee good functional design. SoA guarantees your services look like services, but won't guarantee good multi-service architecture. The difference is that fixing a handful of incorrect functions and fixing a handful of incorrect services is the orders of magnitude in difficulty. So yeah, still start with the call stack. At least until the boundaries become stable and clear. Dealing with SoA impurities after you've identified the boundaries is way easier than coordinating multi-service refactoring or working within a broken SoA.

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