| Yeah, I am also suspicious about people with radical opinions. Truth is USUALLY somewhere not at the end of scale. BUT, have you noticed yours is also a radical opinion? The reality is that sometimes, a radical opinion is actually a correct one. Which is to say heuristics are useful but they still do not replace critical thinking. The problem with Microservices is actually that IMO most developers simply have no time, willingness, experience or mental capacity to think critically about all that stuff. People frequently need to make decisions efficiently. The theory of efficient decisionmaking I have is that frequently enough it is more important to make a decision than to make a perfect decision. And it kind of makes sense because I also suspect majority of the population (and that includes developers) are simply unable to think critically or retrospect about their own performance. And what you do when you have little experience in the field and can't yet think critically about things? You use training wheels. In case of IT (and business in general), a powerful training wheel is imitation. So what happens is that somebody at some company will publish a paper about how they solved a problem and suddenly a bunch of people will try to jump on that bandwagon ("you can't go wrong if they succeeded with it") but without the hassle of having to actually think through it, understand what were the circumstances at that other company, how those circumstances are different from own use case, etc. They will imitate what others have done before but without realising a lot of important things about the problem. Which is how we got to this whole microservices mess. Anyway, I am personally rolling back microservices implementations pretty much every project I join. People do not realise how much time they spend solving problems that are simply due to the fact they have partitioned large application into hundreds of small services which need to each be maintained separately. We have dedicated teams to do stuff that is simply unnecessary (they usually call them "devops", but really they are just ops because more frequently than not they are not actively developing the functionality). All the performance problems, all that inefficiency usually vanishes when you roll all that functionality into a single application and just scale that one application instance over multiple servers. My current team is even more funny. The microservices were originally meant to allow teams to work independently, but at my current team they work hard to bind all of the development process into a single stream of work. So there is some 80 people in 10 different teams all working on same set of environments, applications, with the same monthly release process, coordinating their work everywhere. But there is about 1 service maintained for each developer which means people spend half the time dealing with complex configuration. And the other half of the time figuring out how to improve performance of an application which copies all of its data from service to service. |