What is the right way to use micro-services?

Interesting:

What I find over and over again is that micro-services appeal to leadership more than the developers. This is a somewhat confusing revelation considering micro-services are considered an architectural approach, and project managers are not supposed to fall in love with an architecture (at best, they are weary of it because ‘architecture’ is typically a code word for more boxes and increased cost and time to delivery). And yet.

…Beyond solving the sheer size problem, micro-services promise to solve the ‘different rate of change’ problem. As I have blogged recently, a typical system today have elements of Web sites, as well as Web apps rolled into one. Elements acting as a site have a tendency of wanting to change more often than the app part. Site sections tend to have a lot of marketing material that is time sensitive, while app sections are trickier and need to be changed more carefully (and may require data migration every once in a while). I often joke that these types of systems feel like a donkey and a horse strapped to the same harness – they just cannot find the right rhythm. One of them is either too fast or too slow. In fact, a lot of systems feel like we have a donkey, a horse, a cow and a goat all trying to pull the carriage together – not a pretty picture (funny though).

In these kinds of situations, micro-services offer an organizational, or governance solution, not a technical one. They often result in more moving parts and more complexity, but the relief of letting the metaphorical donkey and the horse run at their own pace is too hard to resist, overhead be damned. The alternative is having a complex process executed with utmost precision, and so far I know only one team (Facebook) that can pull it off with any regularity. Micro-services offer a more realistic alternative for the rest of us (the ‘dysfunctional teams’ from the title, which is really most of the teams).

…In this context, micro-services offer not as much of a solution as “let’s just agree to disagree”. The focus is moved from common technology to common interfaces, integration techniques, protocols for passing data around. There is enough understanding about the advantages of stable protocols and APIs, so this part is much easier to close with a solid and lasting agreement.

…As the monolith grows, it needs more CPU and RAM to operate properly, times number of nodes. As it normally happens, ‘heat points’ are not distributed evenly across the monolith – there are sections that are working very hard, and sections that are barely moving. Cookie-cutter clustering becomes more and more expensive, with an increased percentage of unused and therefore wasted capacity.

Micro-services promise to be more efficient at using resources because we can make individual clustering decisions. We can beef up busy nodes and run a relatively small number of instances of rarely used micro-services. This is a purely economic (and ecological) issue – if we didn’t care about waste, we could just continue to run multiple monolith instances.

Of course, this is all assuming our monolith is clusterable to begin with. If it is not, micro-services become a way out for a system that has hit a limit of its ability to scale.