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by nonameiguess 863 days ago
They're pretty clear here on what the benefits are. Microservices allow you to scale up and down individual system components without having to carry along the rest of a vertically scaled monolith for the ride. This makes for more efficient utilization of compute resources. For a company renting compute resources from the cloud, like Netflix, this can save a lot of money.

What Amazon did, according to this needlessly snarky article that is not Amazon's tech blog, does not conflict with this. It's all theory. In reality, you should not be dogmatic and religious about your architecture choices, but empirical wherever possible. They measured utilization and cost and found they could do better in some cases with monolithic sub-systems. This doesn't mean all of Prime Video abandoned SOA.
3 comments
ndriscoll 863 days ago
> This makes for more efficient utilization of compute resources.

No it doesn't. The rest of the monolith is just a chunk in your compiled binary sitting on disk, which is trivial in terms of resource cost. If that code is not running, it is not using any runtime resources.

Microservices will, however, greatly increase resource requirements if they lead to additional serialization/deserialization, which is relatively expensive. If you're doing video encoding, this isn't such a big deal. For web services, it is likely to be the bulk of the resource cost. This is only exacerbated in modern infrastructures where services are more and more expected to use TLS to talk to each other.

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pookha 863 days ago
Swapping out silicon calls for network calls is the definition of complicated...And starting complicated because you want to achieve some premature optimization is insane. Monoliths are preferable for 90% of the use cases that you see in public or private industries.
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Solvency 863 days ago
Honestly, I get that it somehow became cool to ignore the grammatically correct "computation" and "computational resources" in favor of just grunting "compute" — why not go all the way?

"efficient utility of compute resources", etc. Just shorthand everything.

Does it take a famous developer to do it first for everyone to feel comfortable doing it?

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