Transcription: a Twitter thread from Gary Bernhardt.

  • You, the one who is reading this! You don’t need Kubernetes!
  • Also microservices.
  • Also queues that are separate from your primary database (for most apps).
  • Google cosplay is not business-critical.

Source: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1344341213575483399

  • thesmokingman@programming.dev
    943·
    7 months ago

    Absolutes in programming tend to lead to bad designs. This is more a “I’m gonna stir up some shit on Twitter” post than real wisdom.

    • No microservices usually leads to bloated, tightly coupled logic that ignores business domains
    • No monoliths usually leads to sprawling microservice deployments with tightly coupled dependencies and flavor-of-the-week new ones
    • No Kubernetes usually leads to VPS pets or crazy obstacle courses trying to get SSL termination without a million fucking dependencies in a cloud container orchestration system that isn’t as good as Kubernetes
    • All Kubernetes usually leads to huge SRE costs for a tiny app

    The same shit happened last summer when AWS came out with their “we dropped microservices for a monolith and look at our speed increase” article which ignored good design principles. Sometimes you should split things over business domains so you can deploy and code independently. Sometimes Kubernetes is the best way to handle your scale needs. The stories we normally read are about people doing it wrong (eg AWS making a bunch of microservices inside a domain sending fucking gigs of data between what should have been functions in a single service). Inexperienced folks don’t always know when to move from their minimum viable solution to something that can scale. That doesn’t mean you remove these things, it means you train on when you need them.

    Should we abandon design patterns because singletons or flywheels aren’t the correct solution all of the time?

    • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
      22·
      7 months ago

      All Kubernetes usually leads to huge SRE costs for a tiny app

      Hush, I’m working as an SRE and don’t want anyone to figure this out.

    • JoYo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      13·
      7 months ago

      Even if what you say isn’t true I’m giving my vote of confidence so I can just shrug whenever someone disagrees with my architecture.

      Don’t like that I chose a single API server? We’re avoiding sprawling microservice deployments with tightly coupled dependencies.

      Don’t like all the docker containers? We’re avoiding bloated, tightly coupled logic that ignores business domains.

      • thesmokingman@programming.dev
        14·
        7 months ago

        Monoliths are the answer to bad microservices. Microservices are the answer to bad monoliths. It’s all cyclic and four different architects are going to have fifteen different opinions on how your system should be built. Do the thing that makes sense for your team and try to stay flexible.

    • suy@programming.devOP
      10·
      7 months ago

      Precisely, Gary Bernhardt has given a talk on ideology. I don’t think he’s precisely someone who thinks in absolutes. It’s just preaching that some stuff is (probably) used more than it should. I’ve seen way, way, way worse projects that over engineered things and made things slow and unmanageable, than the opposite. Of course, everyone has seen different things, and our perceptions are amplified and biased by that.

    • Doc Avid Mornington@midwest.socialEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      Saying that some projects, at some point in their lifecycle, don’t need certain things, is not saying that those things have no place. Also, if one can’t design a monolith that isn’t bloated and tightly coupled, one definitely has no business designing microservices. Using microservices is neither necessary, nor sufficient to achieve decoupling.

      Monolithic services are the ideal way to begin a project, as using basic good practices, we can build a service that does many things with minimal coordination, and as it grows and requirements change or are discovered, we can easily refactor to keep things simple. As the software matures, we find the natural service boundaries, and find that certain pieces would perform better if they were separated out and could scale independently, or act asynchronously. Since we have followed good practices, this should usually be a simple matter of removing a class or module to a new service, and replacing it with a facade, such that the rest of the monolith doesn’t have to change at all.

  • blotz@lemmy.world
    65·
    7 months ago

    xD just blocked the spammer and all his comments disappeared. Imagine working so hard to spam and it takes 2s to for someone to hide your posts.

  • Justin@lemmy.jlh.nameEnglish
    362·
    7 months ago

    I mean this is kind of bullshit. There’s a lot of things that run in containers these days, and kubernetes is the best way to run containers. If you can do everything with static js or managed services, more power to you, but as soon as you have multiple services talking to each other, you should be using kubernetes, and you should probably consider message queues.

    • dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de
      14·
      7 months ago

      I never got into kubernetes but docker swarm mode services (not to be confused with old docker swarm) are pretty similar and they’re absolutely amazing for small deployments, even for just a home lab. If there’s anything I want to self-host, no matter if it’s homeassistant, jellyfin, nextcloud, a mastodon instance, a lemmy instance, GitLab or whatever, I can usually just get a preconfigured container, adjust some lines in a docker-compose.yml to fit my environment and be done with deployment in under 5 minutes without having to worry about dependencies, isolation or most configuration. Same for the stuff I write myself. Most of my stuff has a very simple GitLab CI config of maybe 20 lines and immediately shows up live when I merge my changes into main.

  • Platypus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    331·
    7 months ago

    I’ve been migrating one of my company’s apps from microservices back to monolithic Java. It’s wonderful. I haven’t touched a line of yaml in weeks.

    • clif@lemmy.world
      32·
      7 months ago

      Currently migrating a massive monolithic Java application to microservices… The circle of life continues.

      Want to just swap jobs in ~5 years to keep the cycle going? You can migrate this project back to a Java monolith and I’ll migrate your monolith back to micros :D

      • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.worldEnglish
        17·
        7 months ago

        Honestly this just sounds like periodically refactoring everything to remove cruft can be a good thing. Also, it helps you understand how the existing code works if you change it and not break everything.

  • 4am@lemm.ee
    11·
    7 months ago

    Small app developers are all just temporarily embarrassed cloud service providers