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by wowohwow 184 days ago
Bingo. Couldn't agree more. The other posters in this comment chain seem to view things from a dogmatic approach vs a pragmatic approach. It's important to do both, but individuals should call out when they are discussing something that is practiced vs preached.
2 comments
procaryote 183 days ago
If you've run a microservice stack or N at scale with good results, someone saying it's impossible doesn't look pragmatic
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threethirtytwo 183 days ago
I’m not commenting on the pragmatic part.

My thesis is logical and derived from axioms. You will have fundamental incompatibilities between apis between services if one service changes the api. That’s a given. It’s 1 + 1 =2.

Now I agree there are plenty of ways to successfully deal with these problems like api backwards compatibility, coordinated deploys… etc… etc… and it’s a given thousands of companies have done this successfully. This is the pragmatic part, but that’s not ultimately my argument.

My argument is none of the pragamatisms and methodologies to deal with those issues need to exist in a monolithic architecture because the problem itself doesn’t exist in a monolith.

Nowhere did I say microservices can’t be successfully deployed. I only stated that there are fundamental issues with microservices that by logic must occur definitionally. The issue is people are biased. They tie their identity to an architecture because they advocated it for too long. The funniest thing is that I didn’t even take a side. I never said microservices were better or worse. I was only talking about one fundamental problem with microservices. There are many reasons why microservices are better but I just didn’t happen to bring it up. A lot of people started getting defensive and hence the karma.

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threethirtytwo 184 days ago
Agreed. What I’m describing here isn’t solely pragmatic it’s axiomatic as well. If you model this as a distributed system with graph all microservices by definition will always reach a state where the apis are broken.

Most microservice companies either live with the fact or they have round about ways to deal with it including simultaneous deploys across multiple services and simultaneous merging, CI and type checking across different repos.

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