[dontlaugh]

If you depend both on schema and RPC, it becomes very difficult to gradually deploy changes without downtime. You’re forced to be both forwards and backwards compatible.

Worse, schemas are often only part of the contract. It’s very common to have logic and constraints in code, maybe even a majority. To share that across services you end up with shared models, then you end up with some utils with logic, before you know it you have yet another deployment difficulty.

Might as well just not split into services and make it trivial to maintain compatibility and deploy changes.

[withinboredom]

Ah, I agree with your conclusion but not about sharing db's. Sometimes its literally the only way to share data (particularly very large sets of data).

[dontlaugh]

I generally think micro services are a bad idea, partly because it’s so useful to share data and code implicitly.

Somewhat more macro services can make sense, especially when each team owns a service. That’s also when sharing data is harder.

[withinboredom]

Yep. The only example I have from my career was a team having their own read replica and ETLing that to Hadoop. The schema hadn’t changed in 10+ years, so it wasn’t even considered a real risk.

[gmokki]

We had microservices that shared a database, but each got a separate schema. We decided to treat cross schema queries the same as rpc: we export and API from a schema (view or stored procedure) that other microservices can depend on.

The microservice that exposes database level API can do any updates as long as the API stays the same (exactly same as with classical rpc).