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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

Microservices are easy to build and throw away these days. In startups time to market is more important than future investment in devops. In terms of speed of delivery they are not worse than monolithic architecture (also not better). For similar reasons SaaS is and must be the default way to build IT infrastructure, because it has much lower costs and time to deploy, compared to custom software development.

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If you're talking about a web application or API back end with a smallish startup team, time to market is definitely going to be much longer for a microservices architecture compared to developing a "monolith" in a batteries included framework like eg rails, using a single database.

Just to be fair: You are combining microservice characteristics and "using a single database" in your argument.

Please also consider that especially for smallish teams, microservices are not required to be the same as big corp microservices.

I have encountered a trend towards calling surprisingly many things non-monolithic a microservice. So what kind of microservice are you all referring to in your minds?

edit: orthography

If you think it’s much longer, then you haven’t done it with modern frameworks. I’m CTO of a German startup, which went from a two-founder team to over 250 employees in 70 locations in 3 years. For us microservice architecture was crucial to deliver plenty of things in time. Low coupling, micro-teams of 2 ppl max working on several projects at once... we did not have luxury of coordinating monolith releases. Adding one more microservice to our delivery pipeline now takes no more than one hour end-to-end. Building infrastructure MVP with CI/CD on test and production environments in AWS took around a week. We use Java/Spring Cloud stack, one Postgres schema per service.

It is probably not what you intended, but this is how it sounds like: we have a hundred micro-teams of 2 working in silo on low-coupling microservices and we don't have the luxury of coordinating an end to end design.

Edit: 2 questions were asked, too deep to reply. 1. You said 250 people, nothing about IT. Based on the info provided, this was the image reflected. 2. "the luxury of coordinating a monolith". Done well, it is not much more complicated that coordinating the design of microservices, some can argue it is the same effort.

That’s an interesting interpretation, but... 1. our whole IT team is 15 people, covering every aspect of automation of a business with significant complexity of the domain and big physical component (medical practices). 2. can you elaborate more on end to end design? I struggle to find the way of thinking which could lead to that conclusion.

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