BOBoorishBears·Sep 16, 2023
> I specifically called out the extra complexity of network calls in microservices, not sure if you read the full comment.
Calling out networking doesn't preclude me from mentioning IPC. IPC isn't limited to network calls, it can be as simple as shared memory and hit millions of OPS: github.com/OpenHFT/Chronicle-Map
> I'm not convinced; if my small/specific code has its own process, I would say it's a microservice.
And you'd be wrong. A core tenant of microservices is being able to individually deploy your microservices. If I spin up a new process for some high risk, highly memory intensive process I've introduced a fraction of the operational complexity of a seperate server and retained the core value proposition of reducing its blast radius if things go south.
Of course again, if you're having so much trouble handle writing software tha
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t's reliable that you being to consider isolating instability as a top benefit from your IPC setup instead of a tiny value add... it might be a sign you're not ready for microservices.
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> True, sadly it doesn't usually work this way. People take the path of least resistance.
> Also once you add multiple DBs you start to get into eventual consistency; which is one of the harder parts of microservices.
You're making my point: If you don't have the engineering chops as a team to make a robust monolith, you definitely don't have the skills and resources to start looking at microservices.
Eventual consistency is not inherent to having multiple databases. If I have an oft changing ephemeral set of data that only affects one feature and it's creating an impedance mismatch with our main datastore, nothing is stopping us from pulling in Redis for all the queries we were previously sending to Postgres, and as far as anything relying on that feature is concerned, nothing at all changed.
With even half decent engineering, Redis going down doesn't break any differently than it would have for a microservice: you define the same error boundaries as before and the failure case ends up the same.
I mean seriously, if your team can't handle having a second data store, imagine the bedlam when you're trying to handle multiple languages across multiple data sources in a non-centralized manner?
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Microservices are a pattern for companies where a "microservice" gets the kind of development and devops support that would justify spinning off a new mid-sized enterprise.
When you're Netflix your `api/movies/[movieId]/subtitles` endpoint is serving the kind of traffic most companies will never see in their lifetime and needs optimizations that maybe 100 companies in the world will ever need.
For the rest of us EC2 has 224C/488T CPU 24,000 GB RAM machines with 38 GBPs I/O bandwidth. If your business ever scales so far that you outgrow that, throw some of that X Billion dollar valuation money at the problem and build your microservices.