[yencabulator]

You lose atomic deployment and have a distributed system the moment you ship Javascript to a browser.

Hell, you lose "atomic" assets the moment you serve HTML that has URLs in it.

Consider switching from <img src=kitty.jpg> to <img src=puppy.jpg>. If you for example, delete kitty from the server and upload puppy.jpg, then change html, you can have a client with URL to kitty while kitty is already gone. Generally anything you published needs to stay alive for long enough to "flush out the stragglers".

Same thing applies to RPC contracts.

Same thing applies to SQL schema changes.

[array_key_first]

They just refresh the page, it's not a big deal. It'll happen on form submission or any navigation anyway. Some people might be caught in a weird invalid state for, like, a couple minutes absolute maximum.

[yencabulator]

If you're not interested in solving the problem, then don't claim to solve the problem.

[array_key_first]

Right, there's level of solutions. You can't sit here and say that a few seconds of invalid state on the front-end only for mayyyyybe .01% of your users is enough to justify a sprawling distributed system because "well deployments aren't atomic anyway!1!".

IMO, monorepos are much easier to handle. Monoliths are also easier to handle. A monorepo monolith is pretty much as good as it gets for a web application. Doing anything else will only make your life harder, for benefits that are so small and so rare that nobody cares.

[yencabulator]

Monorepo vs not is not the relevant criteria. The difference is simply whether you plan your rollout to have no(/minimal) downtime, or not. Consider SQL schema migration to add a non-NULL column on a system that does continuous inserts.

[array_key_first]

Again, that's trivial if you use up and down servers. No downtime, and to your users, instant deployment across the entire application.

If you have a bajillion services and they're all doing their own thing with their own DB and you have to reconcile version across all of them and you don't have active/passive deployments, yes that will be a huge pain in the ass.

So just don't do that. There, problem solved. People need to stop doing micro services or even medium sized services. Make it one big ole monolith, maybe 2 monoliths for long running tasks.

[yencabulator]

Magical thinking about monorepos isn't going to make SQL migrations with backfill instantaneous and occur simultaneously with the downtime you have while you switch software versions. You're just not familiar with the topic, I guess. That's okay. Please just don't claim the problem doesn't exist.

And yes, it's often okay to ignore the problem for small sites that can tolerate the downtime.