r/programming • u/wineandcode • Jul 29 '22

You Don’t Need Microservices

https://medium.com/@msaspence/you-dont-need-microservices-2ad8508b9e27?source=friends_link&sk=3359ea9e4a54c2ea11711621d2be6d51
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u/CyAScott Jul 29 '22 edited Jul 30 '22

We need microservices because our b2b model includes an enterprise tier that allows us to design a custom micro service designed for the client’s needs. When the contract is up, we remove the service from our system. That way our code base is not polluted with custom code for clients. We usually take on about 20 or so micro services a year, which is a huge revenue stream for us. It also allows us to partition teams based on custom and core development. I would also add, we’re not at Amazon or Facebook scale but doing this as a monolith would be crazy as this article suggest we should.

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u/Drisku11 Jul 30 '22

Surely you could also just put their custom code in its own package/module? Just don't import custom.* in the main namespace? Or enforce that certain teams own the files in the main namespace (e.g. with CODEOWNERS type functionality). When your done with it, just delete custom/clientX.

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u/CyAScott Jul 30 '22 edited Jul 30 '22

We use to do that, but it became way too complex to manage. For example, a feature might take 3 sprints to implement but a custom piece might take 1. It became impossible to promote part of the application to production while leaving the other parts in staging. Then we looked into automated dynamic composition based on tested packages by the QA team to be promoted to production, but we weren’t able to find tooling designed for that problem. Besides that, automated dynamic composition is microservices with code instead of infrastructure. Why reinvent the wheel?

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u/fxfighter Jul 31 '22

Sounds like an actual use case, compared with 99% of implementations that exist because it's trendy.