I’d argue bashing microsevices is more in vogue than microservices themselves. They’ve reached that point on the hype cycle where you can get a whole bunch of likes by saying “microservices bad amirite?!”
Most of the real world "microservices" usage outside of FAANG has been to legitimize polyglot development (a net negative for most organizations) and the to create heretofore unseen levels of Conway's law. A microservice per person? Sure, why not?
It's madness. The solution is to avoid the polyglot issue by fiat and to ensure that there is some actual planning and rationale around when it makes sense to add a service. Most groups I've talked to don't even have a good answer to "why is this in a separate service from that?" when asked, and I've talked to a lot of them.
I agree. There’s a whole cohort that seems to think you should introduce IO between every function call. But they’re not “managing complexity”, they’re just shifting it into the operational layer, where it’s harder and more expensive to run, debug, secure, etc.
That wasn't the argument that was being made. Do you have commentary on the content of the article, or just that you don't like that he had a non-party line opinion?
Nothing in the article is fresh news. Sam Newman made many of these same points himself in his 2015 book on microservices.
The article does _not_ discuss why engineering teams ignore that advice.
Companies see microservices as a silver bullet for solving complexity. Inexperienced engineers attracted to shiny things jump on the bandwagon. Vendors sell tooling to deal with the new complexity. But in that case, if it wasn’t microservices, it would be OOP, FP, SPAs, RPC, RDBMS, NoSQL, etc. The problem is the hype cycle. Over-use of microservices is only a symptom.
He didn't label it as "news", it was an opinion. Regardless if it was said before, who cares? He's not allowed to speak on his experiences because it offends your MO?
I think the opinion he had was justified by his own experiences, which mimic my own - and many of those working at smaller agencies/dev shops (you know, the vast majority of the workforce). It was nice to read something not entirely in the perspective of a Silicon Valley developer drunk on his own ignorance of the rest of the world.
Check out my comment history and you’ll see that I agree with the points too! But the bar for a good Hacker News post is “interesting”. Opinions that are widely agreed with on here, and have been for years, don’t meet that for me personally. That’s my say on the matter, you of course are welcome to yours.
For what it’s worth, I live in the UK, and have never been to the US.
I implore you to watch the incessant, and regular posts on HN claiming that microservices are the future for everyone and everything, and then be there to tell them you've seen this before. My guess is you won't be as lead-footed in those cases. The idea that if you write an article or an opinion, and have to do an hour of research to see if its been covered before is a high level of micromanagement that you just aren't ever going to see, I'm sorry. It's super unrealistic to expect that.
Yep because it is true. Microservices is just the latest "Silver Bullet" that inexperienced developers think will save themselves from doing bad work. The reality is that microservices is inherently more complex than monoliths. So the more you can discourage developers from making that mistake the better.
Which is a good thing, since microservices were way overhyped from the beginning. Now bashing too hard wouldn't be good either, but fortunately, the organizations that need it will be technologically mature enough to be able to ignore the current hype.
Whereas when microservices were overhyped, they were introduced into orgs/companies that didn't have the brain power/experience to implement these properly or just to be able to say an informed no.
A lot of people, especially smart people, like going "everyone says X, I'm going to try to appear smart by arguing not-X".
And that's how you end up with people in the west going "Russia is the victim of the war in Ukraine! Nato encroachment!", or "they haven't tested the vaccines!"
I’d argue that’s being contrarian - taking an opposing stance just for attention seeking.
This is more like “the trough of disillusionment” on the hype cycle. You’ve suffered so much at the hands of microservices, you want to convince everyone else not to use them. Lots of others have suffered similarly, so thanks to confirmation bias, your post gets lots of likes based on the sentiment.
It's madness. The solution is to avoid the polyglot issue by fiat and to ensure that there is some actual planning and rationale around when it makes sense to add a service. Most groups I've talked to don't even have a good answer to "why is this in a separate service from that?" when asked, and I've talked to a lot of them.