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I've seen a bunch of things. Sometimes you have people who try to build a system composed of a bunch of microservices but the team size means that you have more services than people, which is a recipe for failure because you probably also need to work with Kubernetes clusters, manage shared code libraries between some of the services, as well as are suddenly dealing with a hard to debug distributed system (especially if you don't have the needed tracing and APM). Other times I've seen people develop a monolithic system for something that will need to scale, but develop it in a way where you can only ever have one instance running (some of the system state is stored in the memory) and suddenly when you need to introduce a key value store like Valkey or a message queue like RabbitMQ or scale out horizontally, it's difficult and you instead deal with HTTP thread exhaustion, DB thread pool exhaustion, issues where the occasional DB connection hangs for ~50 seconds and stops everything because a lot of the system is developed for sequential execution instead of eventual consistency. Yet other times you have people who read about SOLID and DRY and make an enterprise architecture where the project itself doesn't have any tools or codegen to make your experience of writing code easier, but has guidelines and if you need to add a DB table and work with the data, suddenly you need: MyDataDto <--> MyDataResource <--> MyDataDtoMapper <--> MyDataResourceService <--> MyDataService <--> MyDataDao <--> MyDataMapper/Repository with additional logic for auditing, validation, some interfaces in the middle to "make things easier" which break IDE navigation because it goes to where the method is defined instead of the implementation that you care about and handlers for cleaning up related data, which might all be useful in some capacity but makes your velocity plummet. Even more so when the codebase is treated as a "platform" with a lot of bespoke logic due to the "not invented here" syndrome, instead of just using common validation libraries etc. Other times people use the service layer pattern above liberally and end up with hundreds of DB calls (N+1 problem) instead of just selecting what they need from a DB view, because they want the code to be composable, yet before long you have to figure out how to untangle that structure of nested calls and just throw an in-memory cache in the middle to at least save on the 95% of duplicated calls, so that filling out a table in the UI wouldn't take 30 seconds. At this point I'm just convinced that I'm cursed to run into all sorts of tricky to work with codebases (including numerous issues with DB drivers, DB pooling libraries causing connections to hang, even OpenJDK updates causing a 10x difference in performance, as well as other just plain weird technical issues), but on the bright side at the end of it all I might have a better idea of what to avoid myself. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The sanest collection of vague architectural advice I've found is the 12 Factor Apps: https://12factor.net/ and maybe choosing the right tools for the job (Valkey, RabbitMQ, instead of just putting everything into your RDBMS, additional negative points for it being Oracle), as well as leaning in the direction of modular monoliths (one codebase initially, feature flags for enabling/disabling your API, scheduled processes, things like sending e-mails etc., which can be deployed as separate containers, or all run in the same one locally for development, or on your dev environments) with as many of the dependencies runnable locally For the most part, you should optimize for developers, so that they can debug issues easily, change the existing code (loose coupling) while not drowning in a bunch of abstractions, as well as eventually scale, which in practice might mean adding more RAM to your DB server and adding more parallel API containers. KISS and YAGNI for the things that let you pretend that you're like Google. The most you should go in that direction is having your SPA (if you don't use SSR) and API as separate containers, instead of shipping everything together. That way routing traffic to them also becomes easier, since you can just use Caddy/Nginx/Apache/... for that. |
The thing I keep trying to get people to recognize in internet discussions of microservices is that they're a solution to the organizational problems of very large companies. The right size is one "service" per team but keeping the team size below the "two pizza limit" (about eight people, including the line manager and anyone else who has to be in all the meetings like scrum masters etc).
If your website needs to scale to hundreds of developers, then you need to split up services in order to get asynchronous deployment so that teams can make progress without deadlocking.
Scaling for a high number of users does not require microservices. It does as you say require multiple instances which is harder to retrofit.
> additional negative points for it being Oracle
Amen.