[jrajav]

> But there are disadvantages to: smaller components means dealing with failure at a much finer granularity.

I am really curious why you see this as a disadvantage. At my current job, I've had the experience of moving from a relatively small backend system that was broken up into discrete message-passing parts to a larger frontend system that was mostly one monolithic project. The former was by far much easier to debug, despite it being much older, less sophisticated, and having less logging, simply because it was easier to isolate and reproduce problems. The queues also made it very easy for us to bring down, diagnose, or scale individual components as they ran in production.

I couldn't see this as anything but an advantage, and one that's well worth the added complexity once you pass a size threshold.

And sure you can just go cowboy and say "I'll make it simple anyway!," but firstly, interface-enforced simplicity is not the only reason you would go with queues and RPC (other reasons have been mentioned in the article or by myself), and secondly, it is much more difficult than you think to enforce such abstract common disciplines on a large project.

[DanWaterworth]

I'm specifically talking about failure of components here rather than bugs. When you have more components that can fail independently, dealing with failure is necessarily more difficult, for the simple reason that there are more ways that you can fail.

> interface-enforced simplicity is not the only reason you would go with queues and RPC

No, certainly not. I shouldn't have implied that that was the case. However, if reliability, maintainability or simplicity is the reason why you are considering breaking up your large components then perhaps there is a better way of achieving your goal.

> it is much more difficult than you think to enforce such abstract common disciplines on a large project.

I'm speaking from my experience working on medium-large programs written exclusively by myself. I don't know that my methodology would scale to a team, but I also don't know that it or something similar to it couldn't.