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Comment by schizoidboy | Hacker News Reader

If we suppose that his conclusion is using boolean logic, then what you're saying is a strawman because of his last claim; namely, protobufs are bad if "[...] && !Google":

> They're clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has.

This dovetails with other arguments that I've seen recently that are becoming more frequent:

Have we entered a new world where the lessons of companies working at massive scales are not only generally superfluous for smaller scales, but are actively harmful?

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> Have we entered a new world where the lessons of companies working at massive scales are not only generally superfluous for smaller scales, but are actively harmful?

I think so, yeah.

Microservices turn out to have a lot of negative consequences, and their positives work best when you have dozens or hundreds of developers. If you've got a handful of developers... not so great.

Your argument really depends on the use case. If you have discrete, well-factored operations microservices can make even small systems easier to deploy and manage. For example, you do the front-end API in Java (easier to build secure, debuggable systems with good RDBMS access) and backend analytic services in Python (easier to scrape data out of XML/JSON). Splitting them up into 2 or more microservices can simplify development, CI/CD, and deployment.

Whenever I see large numbers of microservices anywhere my null hypothesis is that some organizational disfunction is leading teams to factor applications into unnecessarily small pieces.

No. But you have to examine use cases carefully including the assumptions. I think this has always been the case but people (in my experience at least) get a little dazzled by the massive scale of companies like Facebook and try to apply their solutions to problems for which they are simply not applicable.

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