Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wg0 732 days ago
I think lots of microservices can be replaced with a monolith which in turn can be replaced with a set of composable libraries versioned separately.

If anyone doubts that, this very browser used to read and write is built all the way up with dozens of libraries from compression, network, image encoding, decoding, video encoding decoding, encryption, graphics, sound and what not where each library is totally separate and sometimes was never intended to be used to build web browsers by the original authors.

Rest assured, most of the business (or web 2.0 systems, search, curate, recommend, surface etc kind of) systems are a lot more simpler then an A class browser.
1 comments
jupp0r 732 days ago
If you are using Chrome, it's also a combination of multiple well separated processes talking via RPC with each other, which is pretty similar to microservices, although the separation boundaries are more influenced by attack mitigation requirements than your typical microservice architecture would be.
link
kaba0 732 days ago
But that’s due to security, not for any supposed benefit of microservices. Also, both processes are from the same repo sharing code, so I wouldn’t really qualify as microservice.
link
Noneofya 727 days ago
That‘s literally an example of the decision depending on multiple factors. Separation of concerns -> more isolation -> stronger security of the overall system is exactly one of the possible benefits of microservices.

Scale is just one. There is also fault tolerance, security, organizational separation (which can be, up to a point, also be realized with libraries as you suggest), bigger ecosystem to choose from, …

link
jupp0r 731 days ago
1. microservices also create security boundaries

2. microservices living in monorepos is common

link
wg0 732 days ago
And even that process separation is spinning up more processes from within the same binary or build artefact. The usual fork() and CreateProcessW() etc and then wait on them.

Unlike in Microservices where each process is possibly a totally different language, runtime and framework spun up individually that too possibly in totally different ways.

link