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Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by twic on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:20AM (#24774717)
You don't need microservices to do this.

Build a monolith which does everything. Deploy multiple instances. Route booking requests to a subset of the instances. Route other requests to the other instances.

We did this at an old job. We had a data-intensive app which had a web UI for users, an admin UI, and an API for data export. They all had lots of common code for persistence, querying, aggregation, etc. Because of the common code, the simplest way to implement the three interfaces was in a single codebase. But because API requests could sometimes crash the app (we didn't do a great job here!), we segregated the API into its own pool of instances. We didn't segregate the admin UI, but could have done that if necessary.

As well as simplicity, another advantage of this approach is that the decision about how to split up traffic is very dynamic: you can change it just by adding or removing instances and changing load balancer config, without having to make any code changes. if you split the traffic up into separate microservices, you have to make that decision upfront, and changing it is a lot of work.

Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by amf12 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @06:29AM (#24775085)
> Build a monolith which does everything. Deploy multiple instances. Route booking requests to a subset of the instances. Route other requests to the other instances.

Don't you now have "microservices" bundled together in a single binary - and deployed together? If each of your component exposes different APIs and each instance only handles certain endpoints, then you kind of have microservices - not literally, but it seems the idea is the same.

Simplicity being a benefit, I don't really see how the dynamic traffic routing is a huge benefit vs microservices - you can dynamically scale up/down microservices too.

I am not saying this is a bad approach, by the way, but just that it isn't much different from microservices.

Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by tmd83 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @01:51PM (#24779445)
I think you can use such an architecture without almost zero or minimal code change. You don't have to split the shared endpoints using some remote API calls since they are all available inside your monolith.
Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by amf12 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @01:55PM (#24779484)
Agreed. Which is why I mentioned simplicity being a benefit - if you already have a monolith that you are seeing issues with. But the parent said "You don't need microservices to do this."; this solution isn't much different from microservices.
Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by janstice on Thursday October 15, 2020 @05:15AM (#24786522)
The GP solution has very little in common with microservices - it’s just a load balanced architecture with specific pools for different workloads. Just like we could do in the 90s.

Microservices are only microservices if they have both narrow focus and radical independence. If they have narrow focus without the independence then you probably have a monolith with 25 executables to deploy.

Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by aabbcc1241 on Thursday October 15, 2020 @03:24AM (#24785836)
Are all "web servers" connecting to the same database (cluster or instance), without application specific database partitioning ?
Re:Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Prof... by twic on Thursday October 15, 2020 @06:51AM (#24787080)
In our case, they did. If you have a clustered database, they could perhaps use different nodes in the cluster. If you have read replicas, they could have separate pools of read replicas.