Designing inflatable Microservices Architecture

MSA that morphs depending upon scale without overcomplicating development.

We’ve all read of the million transactions/sec systems of Google or Linkedin. And we’ve read about the scale of Netflix and its success with Microservices architecture‌‌ (MSA). More often than not, we’re tempted to implement the same level of complexities within our systems, without understanding the complexities involved. But, do we really need a complicated architecture?

As Joe Hellerstein sideranted to his undergrad databases class (54 min in):

The thing is there’s like 5 companies in the world that run jobs that big. For everybody else… you’re doing all this I/O for fault tolerance that you didn’t really need. People got kinda Google mania in the 2000s: “we’ll do everything the way Google does because we also run the world’s largest internet data service” [tilts head sideways and waits for laughter]

However, the MSA‌ is shiny and the boardroom loves ‘shiny’. It gives them some fodder to discuss with their counterparts- as a way to sound smart and important. ‘We’ve implemented micro-services architecture.‌‌ Our products can now handle over a million transactions a second!’, they say. Everybody claps.

Except for the developers who’re dreading the cavalcade of code maintenance complexity…