Ask HN: How many developers should you have before you switch to micro services?

Re:Ask HN: How many developers should you have before you sw... by closeparen on Monday January 21, 2019 @02:43PM (#18962964)

If there are 50 commits in every release, and a 2% chance of a given commit breaking something, then in expectation every monolith deploy gets rolled back. As release engineering gets harder, time between deploys grows, so number of commits per deploy grows, so release engineering gets harder still.

Microservices are one way out of that cycle. But then you need teams to run a distributed scheduler, service discovery and load balancing, RPC standards and libraries, IDL registry, central build system, time series metrics collection and reporting, distributed tracing, a standard framework per language, etc, etc. My employer has at least one person working full time on each of those list items. Some have more than 50. And I wouldn’t dream of doing microservices without them.

At least whatever’s in Martin Fowler’s article [0], and more.

A word of caution: any microservices you do before you’ve actually productionized and standardized all that stuff become very painful tech debt.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.htm...

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Re:Ask HN: How many developers should you have before you sw... by lastofus on Monday January 21, 2019 @04:53PM (#18963952)

> If there are 50 commits in every release, and a 2% chance of a given commit breaking something, then in expectation every monolith deploy gets rolled back.

> Microservices are one way out of that cycle.

Is the implication that microservices lead to fewer bugs, or that microservices allow you to roll back one service instead of the monolith app as a whole?

I would argue the former implication is a dubious claim, and the later doesn't make sense if other services depend on a given service running the latest version, which is often the case when implementing new features.

If you are releasing bugs with every rollout that require a rollback, then perhaps a simpler solution is to do smaller releases with an improved testing/QA cycle.

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Re:Ask HN: How many developers should you have before you sw... by atmosx on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @02:54AM (#18966721)

> the later doesn't make sense if other services depend on a given service running the latest version, which is often the case when implementing new features.

Properly designed microservices should take this into consideration and support versioning, fallbacks, circuit breakers, etc.

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