Programmer Humor

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?