Re:Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
by playing_colours on Saturday January 16, 2021 @06:38AM
(#25801635)
I think your points are about lacking solid engineering leaders at an organisation that could provide guidance and manage execution of the "modular monolith" approach. If a company does not have leaders who can ensure consistency and discipline across a few team within a monolith, I am afraid of the mess they will run into with multiple services.
None of these problems are solved by microservices. Now instead of undocumented unstructured interactions between modules, you have undocumented unstructured interactions between standalone applications. None of your problems are solved, except now you have a much bigger cloud hosting bill.
Re:Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
by marshmellman on Saturday January 16, 2021 @02:47PM
(#25804856)
That’s not been my experience working with microservices for the past 5+ years. It’s in a team’s own interest to document their APIs and design them well, because if they don’t then it’s their own time sink when other teams integrate.
Microservices have problems but the way they’re often portrayed doesn’t match my experience.
I agree with the sibling commenter who said that a microservices architecture exchanges an organizational expense for a technical expense. For certain organizations, it can be the right call.
1. One person or group needs to decide on what the rule should be, what the boundaries are and how to enforce those boundaries. This is usually not an easy process, ymmv.
2. After a decision is made, you'll have to decide on how to put the rule in place. Are you going to stop everything and make sure all code paths are working according to the new rule? Are you going to do it incrementally? New features = new rule, old features = common sense? Another variation?
3. You then start running your new rule and maybe you enforce it with some custom static checks, and when that fails you hope your code reviewers will always catch this every time.
4. You still need that one person or group to make sure this actually gets done and to assess if it actually has a positive impact on velocity and reliability.
Or you can put in an implicit "rule" that new code happens in a separate repository, where you don't need to care. A developer that has to do an API call because they simply cannot "import" another module or "query" someone else's data has no choice but to do the right thing - though many opportunities to do a lot of other wrong things too, this is not a panacea. But when we're talking about more than ~5-6 teams, the coordination effort of making sure everyone is aligned on a monolith can be much tougher than to go to multiple services (hopefully not micro).