[mpfundstein]

Cool story. Our startup (8 engineers) is built on microservices as well. Right now, (after 1 year live, 4 hours downtime until then) we have 43 microservices running. We have a rabbitmq broker for fire-and-forget communications. We use Consul for Service Discovery. Jenkins is used for automatic testing and deployment. I have to say that I love our setup. While there are some things that are a bit more complicated, the increased efficiency is worth it all. On some days we deploy 10 or more times to production.

I have to say. The startup is very well funded and we have a dedicated SysOps guy who helps us with DevOps. He does all the nitty gritty Ansible stuff.

I think the best thing about micro-services is that it enforces service boundaries around aggregates. You just can't leak responsibility if you have to traverse the network. This enforces loose coupling.

Its also much easier to do code review if changes are localized to a small codebase of maybe max 500 lines.

[ebiester]

Since you seem to have it figured out... I'm a monolith guy* in a microservices world. Friday, I had a question asked of me that in our old system was a simple query and I could answer in 5 minutes. This question, however, was split across three separate microservices in the new system, and the information had never been captured in a convenient way in hadoop. (Running two separate queries in two separate systems and writing a program to collate the results takes significantly more developer time. While not insurmountable, it's no longer a trivial task.)

Did you run into these problems? What did you build to solve them?

[mpfundstein]

We have a statistics service for our ML guys. If it needs aggregated data from data stored in different services, the services must implement an API and the statistics layer can then make use of it. Usually one developer will do all of this. We don't have strict ownership.

What we also do is, we duplicate a lot of data into a separate event log. This log is used as a readonly store for analytics. This has the nice additional property that we have an event-log. The micro-services don't write directly to the log, but they can publish events to the broker and a dedicated event-service is used to append the data to the correct log.

Yes. Sometimes all of this is significant overhead, because everything has to be tested as well. But mostly when you start a service, the first thing is to provide all the necessary CRUD routines. Which is 99% of the time a few lines of code as every service is mostly build around at most one aggregate.