ddenchev

The graph is a bit odd on desktop too. The baseline is Feb 1, 2020, which equals 100 units on the y-axis. Given this normalization, I am less concerned about the y-axis starting at 60.

However, the graph would be much more informative if there were 10 or 20 years of data. It's unclear to me why Feb 1, 2020 is a good baseline to use.

Potentially draining down the battery down to 80%

I suspect a lot of companies are pushing for MS architecture because its trendy, not because it makes sense for their own use case, which is what is causing such a strong reaction on HN. Moreover, I suspect that the services end up being very small and as such, rather poorly self contained. All I wanted to say with my comment is that microservices are a tool, and there are certain scenarios where they could be a good solution to a problem (although perhaps not the only one).

I do want to provide a counter point example against everything must be a monolith. Years ago I worked at a medium sized company that worshiped at the altar of monolith and the mantra of "this is how google does it" was often repeated. Unfortunately what they were doing was far from what Google was doing. Their monolith incorporated solutions for multiple, largely unrelated business lines. All of the code deployed across all of the hundreds of servers, and data was shared without any sense of boundaries across the entire app. The company didn't want to invest significantly into the appropriate tooling to make such a large app function well (multiple gigabytes source code written in PHP). The result was a terrible dev experience where deployments took 4 to 6 hours on a good day and the blast radius of a given change was sometimes hard to verify. Its akin to sharing servers between GMail and Google Docs, and mixing up the code together for good measure (so it can be reused). This created a culture of slow moving, large development cycles as well as a lot of defensiveness and fear within the software engineering group. Suffice to say, it was not a pleasant experience.

Before I get down voted a bunch I should say I also tend to prefer monoliths as much as possible. They are much simpler to work with, much simpler to test and easier to analyze. Also if using a good compiled language, the compiler can help a lot to eliminate a lot of common silly regressions. However, that being said, I would consider making a new service in certain cases. For example, if I was building a new, unrelated product or if there was a part of the app that was functionally very different from the rest of the app.

I also tend to distinguish between a mono repo (single repo, can have more than one service in it) and monolith (single app). If you are willing to setup some more sophisticated CI/CD tooling, I think mono repo is the way to go, even when it makes sense to have more than one service in the design of the app.

It is not fair to compare the Facebooks monolith and the monolith at the average company, as they are not really the same thing. The tooling available at Facebook is built and maintained by a team larger than the engineering departments at most companies.

There comes a point, where regular off the shelf tooling does not scale sufficiently well for a monolith. Tests suits and builds start to take too long. Deployments get increasingly complicated. Developers start to get into each other's way, even when working on unrelated features. Additionally, if you are using an untyped, interpreted language, keeping a large app well organized can also be a problem.

Microservices is a tool for dealing with complexity and certainly not the only one. However, building the tooling and infra for a large and sophisticated monolith is not simple and not guaranteed to be an easier solution to the problems listed above.