[CraigJPerry]

I’m a strong proponent of microservices but only for one thing - the ability to scale the number of engineers working on a product. If you can abstract out a contract between each service then developers are unburdened to iterate as fast as they can without constant communication overheads.

The idea of a 2 dev org deciding to replace simple maintenance free function calls with authenticated, TLS-secured, retry-able, service-located, rate-limited remote procedure calls (in the general sense of the term) and replacing simple method parameters with serialisation and deserialisation overhead… it’s all just pretty absurd.

[Puts]

The Linux kernel have had 12,000 engineers working on it while still being a monolith.

[ameliaquining]

The consequence of that is that every release is a fairly big deal requiring a lot of coordination overhead among a huge number of people, which bottlenecks how often they can happen. That's fine for a foundational piece of technical infrastructure like an operating system kernel, but Web apps and other forms of continuously delivered software want to release weekly or more frequently, and there's no way that could happen if every release incorporated 12,000 people's work. That is the problem that microservices solve.

[ravenstine]

Not that I'm super-familliar with Linux kernel development, but that's kind of a special project that has a benevolent dictator and worldwide interest from several industries willing to throw resources at it. I think what you said is sound, but I'm not sure how comparable the Linux kernel is to the way that most for-profit software firms are run. And maybe that says a lot about FOSS.