[macspoofing]

>It's sure a corny stance to hold if you're navigating an infrastructure nightmare daily, but in my opinion, much of the complexity addresses not technical, but organisational issues: You want straightforward, self-contained deployments for one, instead of uploading files onto your single server ...

You can get all that with a monolith server and a Postgres backend.

[benterix]

With time, I discovered something interesting: for us, techies, using container orchestration is about reliability, zero-downtime deployments, limiting blast radius etc.

But for management, it's completely different. It's all about managing complexity on an organizational level. It's so much easier to think in terms "Team 1 is in charge of microservice A". And I know from experience that it works decently enough, at least in some orgs with competent management.

[torben-friis]

It’s not a management thing. I’m an engineer and I think it’s THE main advantage micro services actually provide: they split your code hard and allow a team to actually get ownership of the domain. No crossing domain boundaries, no in between shared code, etc.

I know: it’s ridiculous to have an architectural barrier for an organizational reason, and the cost of a bad slice multiplies. I still think in some situations, that is better to the gas-station-bathroom effect of shared codebases.

[strken]

I don't see why it's ridiculous to have an architectural barrier for org reasons. Requiring every component to be behind a network call seems like overkill in nearly all cases, but encapsulating complexity into a library where domain experts can maintain it is how most software gets built. You've got to lock those demons away where they can't affect the rest of the users.

[vbezhenar]

The problem is, that library usually does not provide good enough boundaries. C library can just shit over your process memory. Java library can cause all the hell over your objects with reflection, can just call System.exit(LOL). Minimal boundary to keep demons at bay is process boundary and you need some way for processes to talk to each other. If you're separating components into processes, it's very natural to put them to different machines, so you need your IPC to be network calls. One more step and you're implementing REST, because infra people love HTTP.

[sevensor]

> it's very natural to put them to different machines, so you need your IPC to be network calls

But why is this natural? I’m not saying we shouldn’t have network RPC, but it’s not obvious to me that we should have only network RPC when there are cheap local IPC mechanisms.

[vbezhenar]

Because horizontal scaling is the best scaling method. Moving services to different machines is the easiest way to scale. Of course you can keep them in the same machine until you actually need to scale (may be forever), but it makes sense to make some architectural decisions early, which would not prevent scaling in the future, if the need arises.

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil. But premature pessimisation is not a good thing either. You should keep options open, unless you have a good reason not to do so.

If your IPC involves moving gigabytes of transient data between components, may be it's a good thing to use shared memory. But usually that's not required.

[pjmlp]

And then we're back to 1980's UNIX process model before wide adoption of dynamic loading, but because we need to be cool we call them microservices.

[torben-friis]

>Requiring every component to be behind a network call seems like overkill in nearly all cases

That’s what I was referring to, sorry for the inaccurate adjective.

Most people try to split a monolith in domains, move code as libraries, or stuff like that - but IMO you rarely avoid a shared space importing the subdomains, with blurry/leaky boundaries, and with ownership falling between the cracks.

Micro services predispose better to avoid that shared space, as there is less expectation of an orchestrating common space. But as you say the cost is ridiculous.

I think there’s an unfilled space for an architectural design that somehow enforces boundaries and avoids common spaces as strongly as microservices do, without the physical separation.

[sevensor]

How about old fashioned interprocess communication? You can have separate codebases, written in different languages, with different responsibilities, running on the same computer. Way fewer moving parts than RPC over a network.

[pjc50]

That was the original Amazon motivation, and it makes sense. Conway's law. A hundred developers on a single codebase needs significant discipline.

But that doesn't warrant its use in smaller organizations, or for smaller deployments.

[saulpw]

Conway's Law:

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

[immibis]

And then you have some other group of people that sees all the redundancy and decides to implement a single unified platform on which all the microservices shall be deployed.

[pjmlp]

Libraries do exist, unfortunely too many developers apparently never learn about code modularity.

[embedding-shape]

> using container orchestration is about reliability, zero-downtime deployments

I think that's the first time I've heard any "techie" say we use containers because of reliability or zero-downtime deployments, those feel like they have nothing to do with each other, and we've been building reliable server-side software with zero-downtime deployments long before containers became the "go-to", and if anything it was easier before containers.

[benterix]

It would be interesting to hear your story, mine is that containers in general start an order of magnitude faster than vms (in general! we can easily find edge cases) and hence e.g. horizontal scaling is faster. You say it was easier before containers, I say k8s in spite of its complexity is a huge blessing as teams can upgrade their own parts independently and do things like canary releases easily with automated rollbacks etc. It's so much faster than VMs or bare metal (which I still use a lot and don't plan to abandon anytime soon but I understand their limitations).

[embedding-shape]

In general, my experience is "the more moving parts == less reliable", if I were to generalize across two decades of running web services. The most reliable platforms I've helped manage has been platforms that tried to avoid adding extra complexity until they really couldn't avoid it, and when I left still deployed applications by copy a built binary to a Linux host, reload the systemd service, switch the port in the proxy and let traffic hit the new service while healtchecking, and when green, switch over and stop the old service.

Deploys usually took minutes (unless something was broken), scaling worked the same as if you were using anything else, increase a number and redeploy, and no Kubernetes, Docker or even containers as far as the eye could see.

[Towaway69]

As soon there is more than one container to organise, it becomes a management task for said techies.

Then suddenly one realises that techies can also be bad at management.

Management of a container environment not only requires deployment skills but also documentational and communication skills. Suddenly it’s not management rather the techie that can't manage their tech stack.

This pointing of fingers at management is rather repetitive and simplistic but also very common.

[9dev]

You don't. When your server crashes, your availability is zero. It might crash because of a myriad of reasons; at some times, you might need to update the kernel to patch a security issue for example, and are forced to take your app down yourself.

If your business can afford irregular downtime, by all means, go for it. Otherwise, you'll need to take precautions, and that will invariably make the system more complex than that.

[macspoofing]

>You don't. When your server crashes, your availability is zero.

As your business needs grow, you can start layering complexity on top. The point is you don't start at 11 with a overly complex architecture.

In your example, if your server crashes, just make sure you have some sort of automatic restart. In practice that may mean a downtime of seconds for your 12 users. Is that more complexity? Sure - but not much. If you need to take your service down for maintenance, you notify your 12 users and schedule it for 2am ... etc.

Later you could create a secondary cluster and stick a load-balancer in-front. You could also add a secondary replicated PostgreSQL instance. So the monolith/postgres architecture can actually take you far as your business grows.

[BillinghamJ]

Changing/layering architecture adds risk. If you've got a standard way of working you can easily throw in on day one whose fundamentals then don't need to be changed for years, that's way lower risk, easier, faster

It is common for founding engineers to start with a preexisting way of working that they import from their previous more-scaled company, and that approach is refined and compounded over time

It does mean starting with more than is necessary at the start, but that doesn't mean it has to be particularly complex. It means you start with heaps of already-solved problems that you simply never have to deal with, allowing focus on the product goals and deep technical investments that need to be specific to the new company

[wouldbecouldbe]

Yeah theoretically that sounds good. But I had more downtime through cloud outages, Kubernetes updates then I ever had using simple linux server with nginx on hardware; most outages I had on linux was with my VPS was due to Digital Ocean issue with their own hardware failures. AWS was down not so long ago.

And if certain servers do get very important you just run a backup server with VPS and switch over DNS (even if you keep a high ttl, most servers update within minutes nowadays) or if you want to be fancy throw a load balancer in front of it.

If you solve issues in a few minutes people are always thankful, and most dont notice. With complicated setups it tends to take much longer before figuring out what the issue is in the first place.

[sfn42]

I don't see how you solve this with microservices. You'll have to take down your services in these situations too, a monolith vs microservices soup has the exact same problem.

Also in 5 years of working on both microservicy systems and monoliths, not once has these things you describe been a problem for me. Everything I've hosted in Azure has been perfectly available pretty much all the time unless a developer messed up or Azure itself has downtime that would have taken down either kind of app anyway.

But sure let's make our app 100 times more complicated because maybe some time in the next 10 years the complexity might save us an hour of downtime. I'd say it's more likely the added complexity will cause more downtime than it saves.

[9dev]

> I don't see how you solve this with microservices.

I don't think I implied that microservices are the solution, really. You can have a replicated monolith, but that absolutely adds complexity of its own.

> But sure let's make our app 100 times more complicated because maybe some time in the next 10 years the complexity might save us an hour of downtime.

Adding replicas and load balancing doesn't have to be a hundred times more complex.

> I'd say it's more likely the added complexity will cause more downtime than it saves.

As I said before, this is an assessment you will need to make for your use case, and balance uptime requirements against your complexity budget; either answer is valid, as long as you feel confident with it. Only a Sith believes in absolutes.

[danmaz74]

You can have redundancy with a monolithic architecture. Just have two different web server behind a proxy, and use postgres with a hot standby (or use a managed postgres instance which already has that).

[pjmlp]

Well, load balancers are an option.

[9dev]

They are: But now you've expanded the definition of "a single monolith with postgres" to multiple replicas that need to be updated in sync, you've suddenly got shared state across multiple, fully isolated processes (in the best case) or running on multiple nodes (in the worst case), and a myriad of other subtle gotchas you need to account for, which raises the overall complexity considerably.

[pjmlp]

Postgres.

[tnel77]

In this job market, how am I supposed to get hired without the latest buzzwords on my resume? I can’t just have monolithic server and Postgres!

(Sarcasm)

[spoiler]

You're sarcastic, but heavens above, have I had some cringe interviews in my last round of interviews, and most of the absurdity came from smaller start-ups too

[chistev]

Indicating sarcasm ruins the sarcasm

[tnel77]

Sadly, it is missed on a lot of people. Without the disclaimer, I would then have a bunch of serious replies “educating” me about my life choices.

[reactordev]

Squint or pretend it’s not there. This crowd is hit or miss on picking it up o’ naturál.

[sfn42]

If you don't make it clear people will think you're serious.

Sarcasm doesn't work online, If I write something like "Donald Trump is the best president ever" you don't have any way of knowing whether I'm being sarcastic or I'm just really really stupid. Only people who know me can make that judgement, and basically nobody on here knows me. So I either have to avoid sarcasm or make it clear that I'm being sarcastic.

[chistev]

Context of the comment would tell

[YetAnotherNick]

Most times it isn't complexity that bites, it is the brittleness. It's much easier to work with bad but well documented solution(e.g github actions) where all the issues have been faced by users and workaround is documented by community, rather than rolling out your own(e.g. simple script based CI/CD).