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0 pointsmpfundstein8y ago0 comments

I might agree with you and your parent. My objection would be that I all too often experienced that seemingly small projects turned out to grow into huge applications. And previously accumulated tech debt is hard to get rid off. So I mostly start out now with my own boilerplates. React + Redux is one git clone command. Docker including Service Discovery (Traefic, Registrator), RabbitMQ and MongoDB is another git clone [1]. So I am productive immediately and the right tech is in place.

Regarding the discussion Micro-Service vs Monoliths. I agree that a monoliths gets you started quicker. But it also asks a lot of discipline from the programmers. E.g. 'stick to your domain boundaries', 'Don't take that shortcut of direct db access because business needed the feature yesterday', etc. Otherwise you'll have big troubles splitting it up later on. [2].

I REALLY REALLY REALLY like that micro-services make your boundaries explicit and enforce you to write contractual APIs aka Interfaces. Much more than all the promises of scalability etc.

[1] https://github.com/MarkusPfundstein/microservice-service-dis... [2] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html

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sheraz8y ago

Question - how long does it take for your projects to “grow into” the stack and complexity you have scaffolded up around it?

mpfundsteinOP8y ago

If I look at the last two, it was 6 month and 9 month. The first one was initially thought to be just another search engine for some of the company's content. Then it got transformed into the main data store including CMS and all those nicetees. In the end, 7 people worked on it. The second one was a tool used only internally by my customer's employees. They then sold the idea to some of their customers and it had to transform into a full fledged product. 4 people are now in charge of it.

I am still coming back to projects sometimes where I didn't do this and I hate every minute hacking on them -.- 'Wish I would have just used React or whatever' are often my thoughts then :-)

mattmanser8y ago

How are those big projects? Why would you need any scalability for that?

From what you just said they're running for, at most, a few thousand people.

In terms of loads/numbers/etc. that's child's play and definitely not "huge applications". The kind of decisions he's talking about are for things with thousands of concurrent users per second, not per day.

That kind of stuff could be dealt with a single desktop computer running PHP and mysql. And you definitely don't need microservices.

In my experience, having worked in both enterprise and consumer startups, enterprise is shallow but broad with little need for any of the complicated stuff and more need to make the code really simple, obvious and uncomplex because it ends up dealing with so many different problems, while consumer scale is where you start needing to get a bit fancy purely because of scale, but it only deals with a couple of problems.

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