story
Anecdotally, a robust backward-compatibility has been seen as a hinderance to e.g. Java's progress (so much that a newer language, Kotlin, was created to break free from that burden).
However, I do think it can be easier to deal with for internal services then for something like Java. When the number of users is in the dozens rather then the millions, it's a lot easier to make sure everyone gets moved over to the new version.
The point of organizations and products is to work as a tightly coordinated machine. The decoupling that microservices create seems opposite to that goal.
Happy to hear different perspectives.
>it's harder to keep everything aligned due to the extra separation (e.g. different code bases, multiple databases, no static validation of remote interfaces etc.)
It's solvable with appropriate tooling. I.e. you can store API definitions in a separate repository and make the services or CI/CD check API usage is valid at build time.
>tightly coordinated machine
What do you mean by that? For example, we have 10 teams all developing different features in parallel, with a tight release schedule. If there was tight coordination for every change, we'd degrade to a waterfall on the scale of the whole organization. Major API changes are discussed in advance during P/I planning; for minor changes, it's a matter of simply notifying other teams "hey, add this to your backlog, please" (we enforce backward compatibility for zero downtime anyway, so it's not urgent)
> What do you mean by that? Data and workflow have to be unified across the company's products to provide the user with a seamless experience. As above, to me this seems may contradict some components of microservices like splitting the database, since one ends up with the same constraints (synchronization, shared schema) while complicating the orchestration (since now cross-system integration is needed).
Sure, something like Reddit or HN can break the unified experience, but any important or productivity system will greatly suffer from such fragmentation. I assume it can be achieved with micro-services, but it seems somewhat harder.
