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0 pointsjedberg4y ago0 comments

I don't remember the hard numbers, but on average each service at Netflix was maintained by about 4 people but there were outliers in both directions. Sometimes there were four or five services maintained by one person, and sometimes there was one service backed by a team of 25+.

The other important number was that about 25% of engineering was dedicated to building the tools to manage the microservices. We didn't work on customer facing software -- the other engineers were our customers. And I found that number to be pretty consistent amongst any company that was fully invested into microservices.

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hackerfromthefu4y ago

For anyone with a monolith considering microservices, that 25% of total is 33% more work than the monolith.

But if 33% more work isn't enough, we can things in languages with undefined behaviour like Javascript, and also use lots of different languages in the services so out support gets more complex!

Jokes aside, the saving grace is t25% sounds like empirical observation so it probably an all up figure so probably includes the large amounts of bikeshedding that often accompanies a microservices implementation.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsjedberg4y ago0 comments

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hackerfromthefu4y ago

For anyone with a monolith considering microservices, that 25% of total is 33% more work than the monolith.

But if 33% more work isn't enough, we can things in languages with undefined behaviour like Javascript, and also use lots of different languages in the services so out support gets more complex!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse