alt Hacker NewsYes, you’re describing a distributed monolith. Microservices are independent, with nothing shared. They define a public interface and that’s it, that’s the entire exposed surface area. You will need to do major version bumps sometimes, when there are backwards incompatible changes to make, but these are rare.
The logical problem you’re running into is exactly why microservices are such a bad idea for most businesses. How many businesses can have entirely independent system components?
Almost all “microservice” systems in production are distributed monoliths. Real microservices are incredibly rare.
A mental model for true microservices is something akin to depending on the APIs of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and YouTube. They’ll have their own data models, their own versioning cycles and all that you consume is the public interface.
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This type of elitist mentality is such a problem and such a drain for software development. "Real micro services are incredibly rare". I'll repeat myself from my other post, by this level of logic nothing is a micro service.
Do you depend on a cloud provider? Not a microservice. Do you depend on an ISP for Internet? Not a microservice. Depend on humans to do something? Not a microservice.
Textbook definitions and reality rarely coincide, rather than taking such a fundamentalist approach that leads nowhere, recognize that for all intents and purposes, what I described is a microservice, not a distributed monolith.
I'm trying to understand what you see as a really independent service with nothing shared.
For instance if company A used one of the GCP logging stack, and company B does the same. GCP updates it's profuct in a way that strongly encourages upgrading within a specific time frame (e.g. price will drastically increase otherwise), so A and B do it mostly at the same time for the same reason.
Are A and B truly independent under your vision ? or are they a company-spanning monolith ?