No basis at all? I knew I was unhinged...
> You don't need to be an expert in distributed systems to use microservices.
True. Hooray for abstractions. You don't need to understand how the V8 engine allocates and garbage collects memory either... well until you do.
> It's literally replacing a function call with an RPC call.
You're not wrong.
Which is the point. Whether for architectural or performance reasons I think you need to understand your domain and model your data first. For domains that map really well to the microservice architecture you're not going to have many problems.
And a formal specification is overkill for many, many scenarios. That doesn't mean they're useless. They're just not useful, perhaps, for e-commerce sites.
But anywhere you have an RPC call that depends on external state, ordering, consensus... the point is that the tradeoffs are not always immediately apparent unless you know your data really well.
> And I've worked on 2 of the world's top 5 ecommerce sites which both use microservices.
And I've worked on public and private clouds! Cool.
The point was and still is the same whether performance or architecture... think about your data! The rest falls out from that.
Until you want to make five function calls, in a transactional manner.
Architecting correct transaction semantics in a monolithic application is often much easier then doing so across five microservices.
You don't need to be an expert in distributed systems to use microservices. It's literally replacing a function call with an RPC call. That's it. If you want to make tracing easier you tag the user request with an ID and pass it through your API calls or use something like Zipkin. But needing formal verification in order to test your architecture ? Bizarre. And I've worked on 2 of the world's top 5 ecommerce sites which both use microservices.
And HTTP is used for many reasons namely that it is easy to inspect over the wire, is fully supported by all firewalls and API gateways e.g. Apigee. And nothing is stopping you using a typed, serialized format over HTTP. Likewise nothing is stopping you using an message bus with a microservices architecture.