>It's worse than that; it's my observation that most microservice architectures just ignore consistency altogether ("we don't need no stinking transactions!") and blindly follow the happy path.
If two microservices have to share databases, they shouldn't be microservices.
One microservice should have write access to one database and preferably, all read requests run through that microservice for exactly the reason you mentioned.
>I've never quite understood why people think that taking software modules and separating them by a slow, unreliable network connection with tedious hand-wired REST processing should somehow make an architecture better.
If you're running microservices between regions and communicating with each other outside of the network it is living in, you're probably doing it wrong.
Microservices shouldn't have to incur the cost of going from SF to China and back. If one lives in SF, all should and you can co-locate the entire ecosystem (+1 for "only huge companies with big requirements should do microservices")
>ustomers couldn't care less, except that it now takes far longer to implement features that cross multiple services - which, if you've decomposed your services zealously enough, is pretty much all of them.
Again, that is an example of microservices gone wrong. You'll have the same amount of changes even in a monolith and I'd argue adding new features is safer in microservices (No worries of causing side effects, etc).
I will give you +1 on that anyway because I designed a "microservice" that ended up being 3 microservices because of dumb requirements. It probably could've been a monolith quite happily.
My problem with microservices is the word 'micro'. It should just be services.
Problem domains (along with organizational structures) inherently create natural architectural boundaries... certain bits of data, computation, transactional logic, and programming skill just naturally "clump" together. Microservices ignore this natural order. The main driving architectural principle seems to be "I'm having trouble with my event-driven dynamically-typed metaprogrammed ball-of-mud, so we need more services!".
> Problem domains (along with organizational structures) inherently create natural architectural boundaries
The "natural" order is very often bad for reliability, speed and efficiency. It forces the "critical path" of a requests to jump through a number of different services.
In well built SOA you often find that the problem space is segmented by criticality and failure domains, not by logical function.
It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that the term microservices was made by analogy to the term microkernel. I think that part of my main issue with the "microservices" is that it conflates highly technical semantics with word forms that are a bit more wishy washy in meaning (i.e., a service is something formed more of human perception, not rooted directly in operating system abstractions).
I wonder if microservices will have a similar evolution as microkernels. While some microkernels almost closed the performance gap to monolith kernels, the communication overhead killed them. It turned out that the kernel's complexity could be reduced by moving some functions to the applications ("library OS"). Linux kernel drivers are only accepted when the functionality can't be done in user space. The extreme version is running single purpose, highly specialized unikernels on a hypervisor.
If two microservices have to share databases, they shouldn't be microservices.
One microservice should have write access to one database and preferably, all read requests run through that microservice for exactly the reason you mentioned.
>I've never quite understood why people think that taking software modules and separating them by a slow, unreliable network connection with tedious hand-wired REST processing should somehow make an architecture better.
If you're running microservices between regions and communicating with each other outside of the network it is living in, you're probably doing it wrong.
Microservices shouldn't have to incur the cost of going from SF to China and back. If one lives in SF, all should and you can co-locate the entire ecosystem (+1 for "only huge companies with big requirements should do microservices")
>ustomers couldn't care less, except that it now takes far longer to implement features that cross multiple services - which, if you've decomposed your services zealously enough, is pretty much all of them.
Again, that is an example of microservices gone wrong. You'll have the same amount of changes even in a monolith and I'd argue adding new features is safer in microservices (No worries of causing side effects, etc).
I will give you +1 on that anyway because I designed a "microservice" that ended up being 3 microservices because of dumb requirements. It probably could've been a monolith quite happily.