[kovacs]

Actually I've worked on a great many monolith projects over the past 20 years, including a J2EE server (WebLogic). And yes that was a huge monolith that had technical debt that needed addressing. When I left there was this future "modularity" project that I'm certain didn't involve introducing network boundaries between the servlet, EJB, JCA containers, etc. to achieve that modularity. And I can tell you that there was a definite effort to enforce interface/package boundaries between the various server components. If you introduced an "illegal" dependency you were going to be talked to about removing it. I want to say that we actually had the build breaking on such infractions after I'd moved to product management.

The point I was making is exactly what you're talking about. That sometimes deadlines force bad architectural choices and that's called technical debt. The laziness and lack of discipline comes with failing to acknowledge and address that debt in the future. As best I can tell people think that microservices are going to solve that problem and I'm saying they won't and that there's not enough thought going into the price of network.

Just like in real life when it comes to being in shape. Diet and exercise. There's no silver bullet there either and it seems to me as though microservices are the fad diet of the current tech cycle.

I realize this stuff isn't cut and dried and easy. If it were then none of us would have well paying jobs to figure out when to use what tool for what job. There's a time and a place for all solutions but I'm seeing the same groupthink I saw back when everyone was purchasing Sun, Oracle, and WebLogic for sites that didn't and would never need those tools. This is EJB all over again as best I can tell.

As far as your shared libraries comment goes, you wouldn't consider having any shared libraries ever? What you're describing are permutations of a shared library that either need to be addressed by the shared library's design by adapting or splitting into multiple libraries. I'd be interested in learning what you do instead of sharing components? Duplicating everywhere?