I’ve come across many people who don’t like Microservices. They complain that it fragements the code and adds potential network failures. These people are not stupid and they are not wrong. They just haven’t worked with a true monolith (even if they claim they have).
Microservices do add network latency and there are more potential failures. It does make transactional operations less reliable. It does add serialisation overhead. It does divide teams or offer the chance to split the solution over too many technologies. It does mean you’re app has to cope with multiple different versions in production. It does mean that integration testing scope is limited to smaller individual pieces like unit tests and not true end-to-end tests. It adds overhead in terms of the beaurcracy of adding or changing contracts. It adds documentation and the need to use Swagger endpoints everywhere! It just fundamentally adds more code and therefore a greater chance of bugs.
However, all that overhead is worth it, if your app is so unmanageable it takes 6 hours for the test suite to run. It is worth it, if a series of breaks had made the business enforce some sort of bi-weekly release schedule on you. The knock on effect of that bad decision is that each bi-weekly release is now bigger, more risky, and potentially causing even more failures. You have a monolith if you branch to make a large refactor and by the time you come to merge it back to master, master has moved on by 50 commits by 10+ people that make you feel like you’re back at square one. You have go around to people and ask how to sensibly merge the changes because you don’t know anything about what their code does because they’re in a completely different business domain to you, the acronyms are completely foreign and you’ve never met the person. The project is so large that each Agile team have adopted their own coding guidelines within the same codebase.
In those situations, Microservices are a real way out. Having your system as a collection of smaller microservices means you can drop a lot of these troubles.
“Monolith” does not mean a shitty product, an unreliable product, a clunky slow product or an old product with a lot of technical debt. It means one so frought with edge cases, fear and uncertaintly that even small, isolated and obvious bug fixes are delayed or forced through tons of beaucracy for fear of breaking the critical paths of the application.
I’ve come across many people who don’t like Microservices. They complain that it fragements the code and adds potential network failures. These people are not stupid and they are not wrong. They just haven’t worked with a true monolith (even if they claim they have).
Microservices do add network latency and there are more potential failures. It does make transactional operations less reliable. It does add serialisation overhead. It does divide teams or offer the chance to split the solution over too many technologies. It does mean you’re app has to cope with multiple different versions in production. It does mean that integration testing scope is limited to smaller individual pieces like unit tests and not true end-to-end tests. It adds overhead in terms of the beaurcracy of adding or changing contracts. It adds documentation and the need to use Swagger endpoints everywhere! It just fundamentally adds more code and therefore a greater chance of bugs.
However, all that overhead is worth it, if your app is so unmanageable it takes 6 hours for the test suite to run. It is worth it, if a series of breaks had made the business enforce some sort of bi-weekly release schedule on you. The knock on effect of that bad decision is that each bi-weekly release is now bigger, more risky, and potentially causing even more failures. You have a monolith if you branch to make a large refactor and by the time you come to merge it back to master, master has moved on by 50 commits by 10+ people that make you feel like you’re back at square one. You have go around to people and ask how to sensibly merge the changes because you don’t know anything about what their code does because they’re in a completely different business domain to you, the acronyms are completely foreign and you’ve never met the person. The project is so large that each Agile team have adopted their own coding guidelines within the same codebase.
In those situations, Microservices are a real way out. Having your system as a collection of smaller microservices means you can drop a lot of these troubles.
“Monolith” does not mean a shitty product, an unreliable product, a clunky slow product or an old product with a lot of technical debt. It means one so frought with edge cases, fear and uncertaintly that even small, isolated and obvious bug fixes are delayed or forced through tons of beaucracy for fear of breaking the critical paths of the application.