
Ask HN: Microservice Patterns: PaaS-less? - dannyrosen
Attempting to understand the nature of microservice architecture, specifically if doing PaaS-less microservices is a common pattern.
======
jacques_chester
Typically they get mentioned in the same breath as PaaS and CI/CD, because
these are necessary preconditions for sanity.

Architecture and design follow the contours of possibilities our tools lay out
for us.

If it is hard to build many little services that interact (circa 1999:
provision servers by fax, meet them at DC, configure each by hand, install
software via FTP, fuck it doesn't work, fuck this I'm writing a monolith) then
they don't get written.

If the cost of microservices drops -- you install a PaaS, you have decent
CI/CD -- then the relative advantages (team independence, rapid iteration and
deployment, somewhat easier horizontal deployments) become more compelling.

You'll see this pattern across the industry. Every "revolution" is really just
a shift in the underlying economics of the different options. NoSQL was
compelling because HDDs are slow, with SSDs the gap was narrowed considerably.
Networks are fast enough that paying the network hop is considered acceptable
for most human-facing purposes, once upon a time we did everything we could to
squeeze stuff into the L2 cache. You can write massively multi-threaded
software in COBOL, but it's probably going to be easier to use Go or Java for
that purpose.

As the relative costs of alternatives shift, so too the industry.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: I don't think PaaS-less microservices is
really "a thing". Hypothetically possible, but going to quickly run into heavy
headwinds.

------
rdli
What do you mean by PAAS?

In my experience, every company that ends up adopting a microservices
architecture ends up building some sort of layer of developer tooling on top
of their ops infrastructure (whether it's K8S, EC2, or something else). This
is because in microservices, you need to make it easy and cheap to deploy new
services, which means developers need some sort of access to operational
tooling (or else you need a huge ops team).

~~~
dannyrosen
Platform as a Service (k8s, ec2, etc) and thank you for your response, it
answers my question.

