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Microservices are an antipattern
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Lindsay Holmwood
April 18, 2019
Technology
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Microservices are an antipattern
Lindsay Holmwood
April 18, 2019
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Transcript
Microservices are an antipattern Lindsay Holmwood
Microservices are an antipattern Lindsay Holmwood
Why microservices?
Design strategy to manage complexity in our systems
Design strategy to manage complexity in our systems
If the system or team get too big, we: 1.
Split the system
If the system or team get too big, we: 1.
Split the system
If the system or team get too big, we: 2.
Split the team
Popularised by the devops movement
Popularised by the devops movement
CD + containers were the drivers
CD + containers were the drivers
In use at the big end of town
“It works for Google, so we’ll scale it down and
get the same benefits!”
We cargo culted a design strategy without understanding the tradeoffs
Real talk: The smallest microservice at Google probably does more
transactions than the largest service in your organisation.
Real talk: We took a pattern for managing huge systems,
extrapolated it down to our size, and hoped it worked.
Real talk: Hope is not a strategy.
Some downsides you should think about:
Some downsides you should think about:
You’re replacing function calls with network calls
Source: “Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud” by Brendan Gregg
Is that latency worth it?
What hard limits are you imposing to control unpredictability?
Microservices are a systems multiplier for your shitty code
None
How is your ◦ modularity? ◦ isolation? ◦ encapsulation?
Refactor first
Then scale when the performance impacts users
1. Make it work 2. Make it right 3. Make
it fast
1. Make it work 2. Make it right 3. Make
it fast Refactor
1. Make it work 2. Make it right 3. Make
it fast Refactor Microservice
Microservices have a higher cost of ownership
Operational requirements: ◦ CD pipelines ◦ Network & compute &
storage ◦ Logging ◦ Monitoring ◦ Tracing & observability
Security requirements: ◦ Authentication ◦ Identity ◦ Monitoring
This costs more (both in systems bills and engineering time)
But what if we just… didn’t?
But what if we just… didn’t?
Problems are harder to debug
Incidents have > MTTD & MTTR
Delivery slows
Increased communication + coordination overhead between teams
Sequencing of changes across multiple services
Poor service boundaries? You have to get multiple teams moving
in the same direction to deliver a change.
Stakeholders for technical changes are rarely exclusively technical
Requires coordination across disciplines like product, design, marketing, analytics, …
You need established and understood communication paths
You need established and understood change coordination
You need established cultural norms for resolving conflict
Microservices are an effective way to separate concerns in complex
systems
Microservices are an inefficient way of organising people in organisations
< 1,000 people
The smaller the org, the smaller the return
You are not Google/Netflix/ AWS/Facebook/…
Do the job you have, not the job you want.
Thank you! (fight me)