

Services, Microservices, Nanoservices – oh my - talonx
http://arnon.me/2014/03/services-microservices-nanoservices/

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PaulHoule
I don't like the implication that this is a fad or that certain serialization
formats are "hot".

If you're dealing with large data volumes, serialization can be the difference
between a job that costs $500 to run vs. one that costs $200. If you're
concerned about the user experience (i.e you are github, not Altassian) then
you know that latency matters, and microserver architecture, properly done,
can get latency way down.

The key thing about a microserver isn't a low line count it is the use of
specialized data structures and algorithms that handle workloads with high
efficiency.

For instance I have a system that uses MySQL. I found the latency of typeahead
and fulltext search was way too high so I set up a Cleo server for typeahead
and an ElasticSearch server for fulltext. These are so efficient that the
hardware requirements are tiny.

Now I can live with the latency, but the running costs are more than I like.
What can I do? There's one particular query that runs really slow, and if I
replicate that data into a special database (even a MySQL with the bloat taken
out of it) I can use a cheap machine to run the hard query and then use a
cheap machine to host the rest of the MySQL.

