this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Problem is that companies are using them for all scenarios. It's often their entire tech stack now, with kubernetes.
It's similar to the object oriented hype that came before it, where developers had to write all their programs in a way so they could be extended and prepared for any future changes.
Everything became complex and difficult to work with. And almost none of those programs were ever extended in any significant way where object oriented design made it easier. On the contrary, it made it far more difficult to understand the program since you had to know which method was called in which object due to polymorphism when you looked at the code. You had to jump around like crazy to see what code was actually running.
Now with kubernetes, it's all about making the programs easier to scale and easier to develop for the developers, but it shifts the complexity to the infrastructure needed to support the networking requirements.
All these programs now need to talk over the network instead of simply communicating in the same process. And with that you have to think about failure scenarios, out of order communication, missing messages, separate databases and data storage for different services etc.
If object oriented design is fundamentally about components sending messages to each other, then microservices are a different route to OO design. If people are bad at OO design, then they're likely bad at designing microservices, as well. The two aren't so separate.
This is where things go really wrong. Separating components over the network can be useful, but needs careful consideration. The end result can easily be noticeably slower than the original, and I'm surprised anybody thought otherwise.
It's absolutely slower. There is no way to make a network request faster than a function call. It's slower by probably thousands of times.
I don't disagree with there being tradeoffs in terms of speed, like function vs network requests. But eventually your whole monolith gets so fuckin damn big that everything else slows down.
The whole stack sits in a huge expensive VM, attached to maybe 3 or 4 large database instances, and dev changes take forever to merge in or back out.
Every time a dev wants to locally test their build, they type a command and have to wait for 15-30 minutes. Then troubleshoot any conflicts. Then run over 1000 unit tests. Then check that they didn't break coverage requirements. Then make a PR. Which triggers the whole damn process all over again except it has to redownload the docker images, reinstall dependencies, rerun 1000+ unit tests, run 1000+ integration tests, rebuild the frontend, which has to happen before running end to end UI tests, pray nothing breaks, merge to main, do it ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT, QA has to plan for and execute hundreds of manual tests, and we're not even at prod yet. The whole way begging for approvals from whoever gets impacted by anything from a one line code change to thousands.
When this process gets so large that any change takes hours to days, no matter how small the change is, then you're fucked. Because unfucking this once it gets too big becomes such a monstrous effort that it's equivalent to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
I've done this song and dance so many times. If you want your shit to be speedy on request, great, just expect literally everything else to drag down. When companies were still releasing software like once a quarter this made sense. It doesn't anymore.
I agree with you, and that is a hellish environment to work in.
There must be a better middle ground for all of this.