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0 pointseloff5y ago0 comments

> Microservices, of course, exasperate this by actually increasing the communication required to make software.

I HATE microservices. I've never seen them used appropriately, although I imagine it can be done. But I think if you increase human communication by using microservices you're defeating the raison d'etre of microservices. That's not the fault of microservices - it's the fault of the humans using them badly or where they shouldn't.

Story time. I once contracted to a fortune 500 doing a $100M total rewrite with literally 100 microservices all in their own git repo. It was such a disaster I contemplated shorting their stock. I don't know how the story ended, but I feel confident it didn't end well.

0 pointseloff5y ago0 comments

> Microservices, of course, exasperate this by actually increasing the communication required to make software.

0 comments

4 comments · 1 top-level

TheCoelacanth5y ago· 3 in thread

Microservices can be okay, but they are greatly overused. They are a solution for very large organizations with a ton of teams. For 100 micro-services to make any sense at all, you need to have at least 200-300 developers.

Total rewrites, on the other hand, are never anything other than a complete and unmitigated disaster. The only way that you can possibly make a $100M rewrite successful is to do it Ship of Theseus style, where the rewritten code is incorporated into the working and actively-used production software long before the full rewrite is complete.

Even then, the full rewrite usually won't complete, so you need to make sure that project is still useful even if you only do a partial rewrite.

justin_oaks5y ago

I've heard of the "Ship of Theseus" rewrites as a recommendation for "evolution, not revolution".

I agreed that the big rewrite (i.e. "revolution") is usually a disaster.

eloffOP5y ago

Full rewrites are usually almost always a disaster. I should know, I've done a few on side projects. This case was a dramatic example of that.

> For 100 micro-services to make any sense at all, you need to have at least 200-300 developers.

Yeah, at minimum. I think these guys were running at least 2 microservices per developer. That made no sense to me.

TwoBit5y ago

Has there ever been a large scale successful rewrite? How much of Netscape/Firefox was rewritten from the ground up?

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