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by javajosh 2327 days ago
Yes, I felt it had a positive impact. The system was already over-engineered for its purpose, something virtually every senior would admit if pressed. uServices would only add to that administrative overhead at design time, and massive operational complexity at runtime.

Having come off of a project that supported 400k registered and 100k active users on a single server, this project isn't yet at that scale and they were anticipating massive scale issues. This mistake was a real bonanza for an engineering team wanting to learn the latest tech; a massive failure for the product that really needs fast UX iterations to succeed.

If you want to talk more about it, you can email me.

1 comments

And if you design your monolith carefully enough you might be able to horizontally scale too.

Back in the late 00s we horizontally scaled a monolithic project with 5mil daily users and another 8mil daily users. Peak was 10k and 15k requests/sec of dynamic per-user webpages.

The hardest part was the databases. Our solution was standard for the time but pretty ugly nowadays: sharding MySQL by user id along with heavy use of memcached.

Would have killed for some of the modern scalable databases. Sometimes I wonder if some people using microservices are chasing challenges since much of the actually necessary hard parts are already figured out.