[bob1029]

Start with a monolith and only break it up if you are actually forced to by the computer (i.e. the process won't fit in ram anymore or eats all the CPU/IO). The second you break up your monolith, you lose its most powerful feature - The direct method invocation. The amount of time I see developers spending on JSON wire protocols, CORS problems, API endpoint designs, et. al. really is starting to concern me. I sometimes wonder if anyone wants to do any actual work or if this is just a big game to some people.

I did the full trip on this microservices rollercoaster. Monolith => uServices => Monolith.

I used to vehemently advocate for using microservices because of how easy it would be to segment all the concerns into happy little buckets individuals could own. We used to sell our product to our customers as having a "microservices oriented architecture" as if that was magically going to solve all of our problems or was otherwise some inherent feature that our customers would be expected to care about. All this stuff really did for us is cause all of our current customers to walk away and force a re-evaluation of our desire to do business in this market. All the fun/shiny technology conversations and ideas instantly evaporated into a cloud of reality.

We are back on the right track. Hardcore monorepo/monolith design zealotry has recovered our ship. We are focused on the business and customers again. The sense of relief as we deprecated our final service-to-service JSON API/controllers was immense. No more checking 10 different piles of logs or pulling out wireshark to figure out what the fuck is happening in-between 2 different code piles at arbitrary versions.

[jspash]

Here! here!

I'm within spitting distance of the end of a project of collapsing a service-oriented system back into a Majestic Monolith. Every step of the way has reduced the lines of code, fixed bugs, saved money, saved time. It's been such a joy that I'm considering doing only this as a side hustle. "Saving" companies who were sold an over-complicated dream.

[bob1029]

> It's been such a joy that I'm considering doing only this as a side hustle. "Saving" companies who were sold an over-complicated dream.

This has crossed my mind a lot lately. I think we are looking directly at one of the largest emerging markets in technology. What do we think the TAM is going to be for undoing webscale monstrosities by 2025? Not every business will fail due to their poor technology choices and will be able to pay some serious consulting fees...

I've practically got a system for doing this now. It mostly starts with domain modeling in excel and all the business stakeholders being in the loop at the same time until everyone agrees. I find if you get this part right it doesn't really matter if you use C# vs python, or AWS vs on-prem to build the actual product. Hard to get opinionated and locked in when your deploy to prod involves a 100 meg zip file and 3 lines of powershell ran against a single box.