alt Hacker NewsI believe in the original amazon service architecture, that grew into AWS (see “Bezos API mandate” from 2002), backwards compatibility is expected for all service APIs. You treat internal services as if they were external.
That means consumers can keep using old API versions (and their types) with a very long deprecation window. This results in loose coupling. Most companies doing microservices do not operate like this, which leads to these lockstep issues.
Yeah. that's a bad thing right? Maintaining backward compatibility to the end of time in the name of safety.
I'm not saying monoliths are better then microservices.
I'm saying for THIS specific issue, you will not need to even think about API compatibility with monoliths. It's a concept you can throw out the window because type checkers and integration tests catch this FOR YOU automatically and the single deployment insures that the compatibility will never break.
If you choose monoliths you are CHOOSING for this convenience, if you choose microservices you are CHOOSING the possibility for things to break and AWS chose this and chose to introduce a backwards compatibility restriction to deal with this problem.
I use "choose" loosely here. More likely AWS ppl just didn't think about this problem at the time. It's not obvious... or they had other requirements that necessitated microservices... The point is, this problem in essence is a logical consequence of the choice.