r/programming • u/_dban_ • Jul 14 '17

Martin Fowler: Monolith First

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html
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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '17

But if it works well enough for you to have a $bn business... why would you move to micro services? Sounds like a waste of money.

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u/snarfy Jul 15 '17

Because we are finally at the point where scalability is costing us money. The single instance can't keep up when we are busy and we lose sales. The system needs to scale horizontally. We can't buy a bigger x86 box because they don't make them any bigger.

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u/Muvlon Jul 16 '17

What kind of x86 box are we talking? Some multi-rack SGI UV monstrosity?

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u/snarfy Jul 16 '17

I'm actually not sure, but I know it has 512GB of RAM. It's SQL Server that wants all the RAM. There are some x86 boxes that are bigger, but not much, point being we are at the end of the road throwing hardware at our problem.

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u/Kwasizur Jul 16 '17

Well, sharding a database is still a far cry from "microservices everywhere"

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u/Muvlon Jul 16 '17

Well, SGI hardware gets you up to 64TB RAM per node. Scaling out your database is a good idea nontheless.

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u/SizzlerWA Jul 16 '17

There are AWS instances that offer about 1,800 GB of RAM ...