alt Hacker NewsI would really like to send this article out to all the developers in my small company (only 120+ people, about 40 dev & test) but the political path has been chosen and the new shiny tech has people entranced.
What we do (physics simulation software) doesn’t need all the complexity (in my option as a long time software developer & tester) and software engineering knowledge that splitting stuff into micro services require.
Only have as much complexity as you absolutely need, the old saying “Keep it simple, stupid” still has a lot of truth.
But the path is set, so I’ll just do my best as an individual contributor for the company and the clients who I work with.
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IMO, Engineering mindset is a huge challenge when it comes to 'do you do microservices'
And by that, I mean that I have at times seen and/or perhaps even personally used as a cudgel - "This thing has a specific contract and it is implicitly separate and it forces people to remember that if their change needs to touch other parts well then they have to communicate it". In the real world sometimes you need to partition software enough that engineers don't get too far out of the boundaries one way or another (i.e. changes inadvertently breaking something else because they were not focused enough)
I would really like to send this article back in time 11 years
This article shows up here once in a while, but it's a good read: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/tech-is-a-pop-culture/
I thought microservices were old by now, which is why this kind of articles are finally appearing.
If you have workloads with different shapes, microservices make sense.
If not, do the monolith thing as long as you can.
But if you're processing jobs that need hand off to a GPU, just carve out a service for it. Stop lamenting over microservices.
If you've got 100+ engineers and different teams own different things, try microservices. Otherwise, maybe keep doing the monolith.
If your microservice is as thin as leftpad.js and hosts only one RPC call, maybe don't do that. But if you need to carve out a thumbnailing service or authC/authZ service, that's a good boundary.
There is no "one size fits all" prescription here.
I started making the case for organizational efficiency rather than a technical argument. Demonstrating where the larger number of people and teams necessary to make a decision and a change and how that impacts the amount of time to ship new features has been more effective IME.