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by bob1029 1493 days ago
> They don’t actually mind proprietary languages. They want products that work, and products that work together. Modularity and flexibility are useful to the extent that they’re means to those ends.

This is why we are a pure Microsoft shop today. Between Visual Studio, GitHub and .NET/C#, we have been able to construct a stable, long-term B2B product stack with a very small team. If we had selected a more diverse tech stack, it is almost certain that we would have failed. I know this because we tried microservices, simply on top of a pure Microsoft stack, and it almost killed us. I cannot imagine the depths of hell we would be in if we had tried to mix & match different tech on top of that horrible idea.

Are we taking some risk that we are missing out on some amazing new tech that Microsoft would frown upon? Absolutely. But, we know what works for us, the roadmaps are clear, and our customers are happy (they love that we only have ~1 vendor). The things that Microsoft does not like, we just invent in-house. Fortunately, there isn't a lot of stuff we disagree on these days.
2 comments
stickfigure 1493 days ago
There's nothing wrong with the Microsoft stack. There's also nothing wrong with any of a dozen other stacks. A small team that knows their stack well will perform well.

Microservices, on the other hand, are an effective way to burn engineering resources on something that feels like productive work but delivers no business value. I wouldn't infer much about the merits of tech stacks based on that experience.

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throw0101a 1492 days ago
> There's nothing wrong with the Microsoft stack.

Except for the security mono-culture, where a single vulnerability can take out your entire operation. Just ask Maersk about NotPetya:

* https://www.i-cio.com/management/insight/item/maersk-springi...

* https://gvnshtn.com/posts/maersk-me-notpetya/

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mountainriver 1493 days ago
Yeah I was going to say the same. They likely failed at micro services because it isn’t their wheelhouse and it’s a skill set you need to master.

I’ve seen lots of successful service oriented architectures

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dan-robertson 1493 days ago
Look at stack overflow. They run a very popular site as a monolithic app on a small number of IIS and SQLServer boxes (and presumably some amount of CDN/cache)
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