this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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I totally agree that most servers work best as monoliths. Though at the same time, every now and then there's a case that really needed a microservice and you'll regret not having started that way, cause migrating a monolith that was never designed to be anything but a monolith can be really hard.
I have one of those. A server that is so large, complicated, and contributed to by so many different teams that it takes a lot of extra work to safely release and debug issues. Honestly, the monolithic structure does still make it easier to understand as a whole. It's not like splitting the server up would make understanding the end-to-end experience any easier (it would definitely become more complicated). But releasing such big servers with so many changes is harder, especially since users don't care about your architecture. They want it to work and they want 100% uptime. A bigger server means more to verify correctness before you can release it and when something is incorrect, you might be blocked on some other team fixing it.
Maybe it's because my career has been based around microservices for the past few years, but I don't think the need for microservices is as narrow as many folks think. At least within a large company it's as much about segregating lines of concern and responsibility as it is about speed and efficiency. It's a lot easier and cheaper to spin up new hardware than it is to manage and coordinate all the varied interests in a monolith.
You point out the problems of a monolith that has grown beyond the ability to effectively manage it, but every application only grows (until it is replaced). I think we are in agreement other than you minimize the usefulness more than I would.
My experience is every monolith either grows until it is so full of tech debt that it can't be maintained effectively any more, or it gets cloned over and over with minor variations and you wind up with huge messes of rewriting the same code over and over necessitating a massive development undertaking when a new business need comes along - and then the whole shebang gets shit-canned to be replaced by a new product.
Properly architected microservices segregate concerns and make huge efforts easier to do in small units and often simultaneously. It doesn't have to be this way. It's fair to say that only is a problem with poorly architected monoliths, but my experience is bad architecture always creeps in or is never fixed because it works well enough for now. The forced segregation is inefficient, and frustrating as hell for juniors, but at the project management level it's a huge boon.
Just my perspective after twenty five years. But as I say, I'm heavily invested in microservices and don't claim to be unbiased. Monoliths have their place, but I think businesses that are serious about their software need microservices.
My hot take is that unmaintainable monoliths result from poor system design / too strong coupling. If you can't cleave off portions of your monolith without breaking it you built it wrong in the first place, and the choice between monolith and microservice isn't going to save you. Perhaps starting with a microservice forces people to make (or at least consider) better design choices from the beginning but 1. there is no reason you can't make those same architectural decisions with a monolith and 2. you can still strongly couple microservices with poor design.
Getting back to basics of "what makes for good application development" using good abstractions, Go4 patterns, SOLID / KISS / DRY / etc, means that whether your threads are running colocated vs on another VM vs on another box vs in another datacenter vs in another continent shouldn't affect you much. If your app breaks in ways beyond "I wonder if moving this job to another system means we'll suffer from memory nonlocality or sync latency" the walls are already closing in lol.
Yeah I agree with all of that. Architecture is hard and you don't normally fully understand what you need until you've built it the wrong way.