[mlthoughts2018]

This sounds sanctimonious and rife with the exact same inexperience and overly brittle purist attitudes you are criticizing.

It really is true that huge monolith legacy systems might prevent dev teams focused on product growth from even being capable of doing their jobs, let alone meeting aggressive deadlines.

It doesn’t always mean microservices or heavy re-architecture is the right choice, but sometimes it absolutely is.

The places where I’ve seen the most value to pivoting away from existing monoliths often have benefited a lot from microservices.

I was part of a group that split a huge tangled mess of search engine and image processing services in a monorepo into separate smaller web services, and by further separating them into distinct repos per project, we could migrate things to new versions, convert some legacy Java services into Python to take advantage of machine learning tools that fundamentally do not exist in jvm languages, all in more careful, isolated ways that monorepo tooling just simply doesn’t support, and lots of other things that would not have been possible if we tried to steadily change portions while preserving their co-integration in a single large project that attempted to support modularization in ways that were simply just bad.

Your language seems to betray the fact that you personally associate the entire concept of microservices with being intrinsically dogmatic.

Typically only dogmatic people feel that way, in my experience. But either way, there’s nothing inherently dogmatic about a microservices approach.

[thestephen]

To be fair, here is a direct quote from the parent:

»In the end, it's absolutely the case that a movement to microservices is something that should be evolutionary, and in direct need to technical requirements.«

I would argue that what you did is exactly that. Perhaps with the caveat that it should have been done earlier.

I'm not reading tha parent arguing that one should stick with a monorepo/monolith until the end of time, but rather providing a few thoughts around what might cause a push in applying microservices incorrectly.

[JamesBarney]

Isn't the argument that is being made that you did things exactly right. That microservices are a great architecture to migrate to when you feel the need. But aren't a great to start a project.

[mlthoughts2018]

I don’t see how you get that at all. The comment starts out expressly criticizing when organizations consider migrating to microservices from existing monolith projects.

[JamesBarney]

The comment was arguing the use of microservices is far more common than the need for microservices. And based on your description it sounds like you guys were one of the few that had a need for microservices.

[mlthoughts2018]

> " The comment was arguing the use of microservices is far more common than the need for microservices."

In re-reading the parent comment several times now and taking some time to reflect on it, I find that I am not able to agree with this interpretation of it.

As I understand it, the parent comment is taking issue with any type of reaction to a monolith in the direction of switching to microservices as a tactic to get rid of the blockage and tech debt. The comment does allow that some cases may support the use of microservices, but this secondary comment is so at odds with the sanctimonious tone sardonically criticizing people who want to migrate to SOA from a monolith, that I just do not find that phrasing to contribute much to my understanding of the comment. It seems clear to me that the comment means to harshly denigrate the idea of wanting to switch to SOA as a solution strategy in those cases, and the "concession" that sometimes it might be the right thing to do is tacked on, not really related to everything else.

I accept that we might just agree to disagree on the interpretation, but I still feel comfortable that my original interpretation is the most consistent with the available text of the comment and the context of it.