
Why Working on Monoliths Is Bad for Your Career - codyb
https://lightstep.com/blog/why-working-on-monoliths-is-bad-for-your-career/
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tylerchr
Despite having spent the last two years working specifically on addressing the
operational issues caused by a monolith, I couldn't find anything apart from
the title and the implied pro-microservice premise in this post that I agree
with.

A monolith's tests need not take all day to run. Features don't need to take
weeks or months to ship—one can practice agile even inside a monolith. A
monolith does not preclude the use of modern tooling—we adopted CI/CD and
distributed tracing despite having a monolith, and use them to great effect.

In some cases scaling a monolithic codebase may be _more_ instructive about
how to scale, because it's not as simple as "pay AWS more money and use more
instances." Instead, you're forced to understand bottlenecks and consider how
to solve them with algorithmic changes. Circuit-breaking is a critical feature
in a monolith, even more so since one bad type of request could otherwise ruin
the day for everyone.

The inability to "rewrite your business" has more to do with how well-
architected your platform is than whether you have microservices. Both
monolithic and microservices can be built well and built badly; a clean
monolith is straightforward to rewrite the same way that cleanly-designed
microservices are.

My personal opinion aligns with that of the author and greatly favors
microservice architectures. But the usual hatred of monoliths strikes me as
more dogmatic than well-reasoned, and I find this post to ultimately fail in
defending its claim by falling victim to that.

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justusw
Either the author is trolling or they are trying to convince us to switch to
Microservices, so that once we have a big ball of mud Lightstep can come in to
save the day.

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tawat987
They're just describing the difference between good development practices and
bad ones.

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anm89
Is it just me or is the author confusing the concepts of ci/cd and
microservices?

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mbrodersen
BS

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tutfbhuf
bad

