[crashoverdrive]

I feel like if you're building them brittle, you're building them wrong.

I had the pleasure of watching Sam Newman's tutorial on microservices. He's uploaded the slides here: http://t.co/2nhDBJK1oB

Building microservices requires a few changes in culture. If you are moving from a monolith to microservices, your entire culture must change how you look at problems must change and if you fail to do those things, of course your transition will change. It is not a silver bullet. It is a paradigm shift.

[crdoconnor]

The more people use the phrases 'paradigm shift', 'culture change' and 'I feel like" and the less people give actual hard-nosed technical justification for this new architectural mold, the more convinced I become that it is a transient fashion that needs to die already.

[pc86]

This comment is identical to "I feel like it" except it's essentially just "I don't like micro-services." Your earlier comment did not provide any "hard-nosed technical justification" for why you don't like them, it was just "they're brittle" which the GP is arguing that if they are they're not implemented correctly.

What is the hard-nosed technical justification for either microservices being brittle by default or for them not being a realistic way to build a system?

[duaneb]

> technical justification for this new architectural mold

The technical justification is easier than the cultural or managerial justification: you can make more granular technical decisions by splitting and merging code across services and servers. This is very powerful.

Microservices aren't going away—they are the core of a successful, scalable distributed system. The hype surrounding the term is definitely loaded with cultural and managerial implications that are rarely addressed, however, and I hope that changes soon.

[crashoverdrive]

Okay then. Let's play the "hard nosed technical justification" for this new architectural mold. Specifically pointed at your issues.

> The serialization/deserialization layer adds potential for bugs.

Adding an agreed upon layer that aligns with clean architecture[0) will actually produce less bugs both upstream and downstream. (This is why contract apis are important) and are actually more valuable than monolithic systems where there is a sincere lack of data and state guarantees. (clean understanding vs black box mentality)

> The massively increased number of services all need constant monitoring.

It's the same amount of monitoring. It's just horizontally scaled and is actually easier to pinpoint issues. This also allows you the ability to change or create circuit breakers to fail over when issues targeting specific are found. (see slides 134-150 of Sam Newman's principles of microservices [1])

> The massively multiplied error conditions (what happens when service 37 talks to 39 and 39 times out?) need to be accounted for and those edge cases must be ironed out.

They should have been "ironed out" well before this point to begin with. If the application fails due to infrastructure issues, it is actually an application design failure that should have been identified and resolved previously via TDD and failure state testing. Graceful failure is always desirable, and having a legacy monolithic application does not prevent infrastructure/connectivity failures. (for reference, check out Martin Fowler's "The 12 Factor App" [2])

> You get fuck all except migraines caused by the brittleness of your app.

What it sounds like you're saying is:

"Building a monolithic app allows you to crutch bad behavior and poor design without having to understand the realities of software. You can ignore scalability, clean architecture, concurrency, data modeling and graceful failures."

I can understand how moving to a microservice could seem very painful and have a brittle result without the depth of understanding these realities. This is specifically why I noted it is a required paradigm shift for many developers.

For more inspired reading, you may want to checkout Gilt's discussions on moving to microservices.[3]

[0] http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-arch...

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/spnewman/principles-of-microservic...

[2] http://12factor.net/

[3] http://tech.gilt.com/post/102628539834/making-architecture-w...