world-hey-com-ivvqlb.txt (4893B)
1 [1] [avatar-fb3] 2 3 David Heinemeier Hansson 4 5 May 4, 2023 6 7 Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices 8 9 The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather [2]remarkable case study 10 on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and 11 replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!!) 12 on operating costs, and simplified the system too. What a win! 13 14 But beyond celebrating their good sense, I think there's a bigger point here 15 that applies to our entire industry. Here's the telling bit: 16 17 18 "We designed our initial solution as a distributed system using serverless 19 components... In theory, this would allow us to scale each service 20 component independently. However, the way we used some components caused us 21 to hit a hard scaling limit at around 5% of the expected load." 22 23 24 That really sums up so much of the microservices craze that was tearing through 25 the tech industry for a while: IN THEORY. Now the real-world results of all 26 this theory are finally in, and it's clear that in practice, microservices pose 27 perhaps the biggest siren song for needlessly complicating your system. And 28 serverless only makes it worse. 29 30 What makes this story unique is that Amazon was the original poster child for 31 service-oriented architectures. The far more reasonable prior to microservices. 32 An organizational pattern for dealing with intra-company communication at crazy 33 scale when API calls beat scheduling coordination meetings. 34 35 SOA makes perfect sense at the scale of Amazon. No single team could ever hope 36 to know or understand everything needed to steer such a fleet of supertankers. 37 Making teams coordinate via published APIs was a stroke of genius. 38 39 But, as with many good ideas, this pattern turned toxic as soon as it was 40 adopted outside its original context, and wreaked havoc once it got pushed into 41 the internals of single-application architectures. That's how we got 42 microservices. 43 44 In many ways, microservices is a zombie architecture. Another strain of an 45 intellectual contagion that just refuses to die. It's been eating brains since 46 the dark days of J2EE (remote server beans, anyone??) through the [3] 47 WS-Deathstar nonsense, and now in the form of microservices and serverless. 48 49 But this third wave seems finally to have crested. I wrote an ode to [4]The 50 Majestic Monolith way back in 2016. Kelsey Hightower, one of the leading voices 51 behind Kubernetes, [5]put it beautifully in 2020: 52 53 54 "We’re gonna break [the monolith] up and somehow find the engineering 55 discipline we never had in the first place... Now you went from writing bad 56 code to building bad infrastructure. 57 58 Because it drives a lot of new spend, it drives a lot of new hiring… So a 59 lot of people get addicted to all the flourishment of money, and marketing, 60 and it’s just a lot of buzz that people are attaching their assignment to, 61 when honestly it’s not gonna necessarily solve their problem." 62 63 64 Bingo. Replacing method calls and module separations with network invocations 65 and service partitioning within a single, coherent team and application is 66 madness in almost all cases. 67 68 I'm happy that we beat back the zombie onslaught of that terrible idea for the 69 third time in my living memory, but we still need to stay vigilant that we'll 70 eventually have to do it again. Some bad ideas simply refuse to die no matter 71 how many times you kill them. All you can do is recognize when they rise from 72 the dead once more, and keep your retorical shotgun locked and loaded. 73 74 About David Heinemeier Hansson 75 76 Made [6]Basecamp and [7]HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of [8] 77 37signals. Created [9]Ruby on Rails. Wrote [10]REWORK, [11]It Doesn't Have to 78 Be Crazy at Work, and [12]REMOTE. Won at Le Mans as a [13]racing driver. Fought 79 the big tech monopolies as an [14]antitrust advocate. Invested in [15]Danish 80 startups. 81 Subscribe to get future posts via email (or grab the [16]RSS feed) 82 [17][ ] Subscribe 83 [19]Sent to the world with HEY 84 85 86 References: 87 88 [1] https://world.hey.com/dhh 89 [2] https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90 90 [3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/1428661128/ 91 [4] https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-majestic-monolith/ 92 [5] https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the-future 93 [6] https://www.basecamp.com/ 94 [7] https://www.hey.com/ 95 [8] https://37signals.com/ 96 [9] https://rubyonrails.org/ 97 [10] https://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745 98 [11] https://www.amazon.com/Doesnt-Have-Be-Crazy-Work/dp/0062874780 99 [12] https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Not-Required/dp/0804137501 100 [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNQl0x6WS3M 101 [14] https://dhh.dk/#antitrust 102 [15] https://dhh.dk/#investor 103 [16] https://world.hey.com/dhh/feed.atom 104 [19] https://www.hey.com/world/?utm_source=hw-web