[thimp]

Yep. Microservices! AWS! Everything Gartner and Thoughtworks says! It'll look good on my resume...

..several years later..

Escalating cloud costs, high staffing cost, staff turnover, heavily reduced margins, decreased productivity, burnout, clients unsatisfied, C-suite paving over this by hiring more marketers...

[CuriouslyC]

I wonder how many early stage businesses went tits up because they drank the microservice kool-aid and burned valuable engineering cycles that should have been spent on features on docker spaghetti.

[yen223]

I once interviewed at Fast. One of the questions they asked was how to scale up a rate limiter. In my mind I was wondering why you'd ever need to worry about scaling up a rate limiter. The answer apparently was some kind of microservice.

The company eventually folded[1]. Turns out the company was burning millions of dollars in hiring + infra, while generating only $600,000 in revenue.

[1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast

[dullcrisp]

Alternatively how many later stage business failed because all their features were in a Rails monolith that no number of engineers could maintain.

[rqtwteye]

The Rails monolith companies probably have a better chance at adapting than the 50 microservices maintained by 10 devs companies.

[thimp]

This. Just silo the monolith out into tenants.

Salesforce, not exactly a small monolith company, did this for a very very long time.

[marcosdumay]

Well, did it look good on the resume?

[thimp]

Someone had to stay behind and muck out the stables...

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, but if that expectation was false, those people were justly punished. And if it was true, the problem is clearly elsewhere.