
Should I Use a Microservices Architecture? - BerislavLopac
https://dev.to/jamesmh/should-i-use-a-microservices-architecture-4751
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nwah1
Experience says no. Betteridge's law of headlines says no. I'm going with no.

But, given Conway's law, if you are a giant organization, then it probably
meshes well with your organizational hierarchy, and you will use it regardless
of whether it makes sense.

It probably does make sense if you are one of the few Big Tech companies
working with trillions of transactions, since fault tolerance and scalability
are paramount over absolute cost and maintability.

I worked on a "microservice" architecture at a very large firm using AWS
Lambda. But it was entirely the wrong approach, and we were explictly
forbidden from even implementing it in a textbook fashion. Would call it more
of a hydra architecture - a term for this anti-pattern that I just made up -
since it had a shared database. This is probably fairly typical.

And even though the organization was very large, it wasn't actually dealing
with big data in any real sense, and you probably aren't either. You aren't
Google. [1]

Luckily Infrastructure-as-Code is making it less terrible to do this, but it
is still silly.

I think what they really wanted was a serverless architecture, but that
could've been done as a monolith. With something like AWS Fargate you can have
infrastructure-as-code and no server administration, and yet it will be a
stateful always-on container.

[1] [https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-
google-84912cf44afb](https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-
google-84912cf44afb)

