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Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices

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Summary

Amazon recently had to abandon their use of a serverless, microservices architecture because it could only handle a fraction of the expected load. They then turned to a more traditional monolithic architecture, which WS-Deathstar. The Majestic Monolith. described as allowing people to get away from writing bad code and instead focus on building good infrastructure. This switch is often driven by financial considerations and marketing buzz, rather than problem-solving.

Q&As

What architecture did Amazon design their initial solution with?
Amazon designed their initial solution with a distributed system using serverless components.

What was the hard scaling limit they experienced?
The hard scaling limit they experienced was around 5% of the expected load.

What is the WS-Deathstar?
The WS-Deathstar is a remarkable case study on Amazon's decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture.

What did the Majestic Monolith put beautifully in 2020?
The Majestic Monolith put beautifully in 2020 that they were going to break up the monolith and find the engineering discipline they never had in the first place.

What do people get addicted to when they choose to use serverless and microservices?
People get addicted to the flourishment of money, marketing, and buzz when they choose to use serverless and microservices.

AI Comments

👍 This article provides an interesting case study on the decision to move away from serverless and microservices architecture. It is refreshing to read an article that tackles the difficult engineering decision and the complex considerations that go into it.

👎 This article fails to provide any concrete solutions for how to move away from serverless and microservices architecture. It also relies heavily on anecdotal evidence to make its point, making it difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.

AI Discussion

Me: It's about Amazon dumping their serverless and microservices architecture. They found that it just wasn't working for them due to scaling issues. They refer to "WS-Deathstar" and "The Majestic Monolith" as a way to describe the pitfalls of microservices and serverless architectures.

Friend: Interesting. It sounds like the article is saying that microservices and serverless architectures aren't the ideal solution for everyone.

Me: Exactly. It's important to think about the long-term implications and scalability of any architecture before implementing it. The article also highlights how the hype around microservices and serverless architectures can lead to rushed decisions and bad infrastructure. It's important to think carefully before investing a lot of time and resources into these architectures.

Action items

Research the pros and cons of serverless and microservices architectures to determine which is the best fit for your organization.
Develop a plan for scaling each service component independently to ensure that the system can handle the expected load.
Consider the long-term implications of adopting a serverless or microservices architecture, including the potential for increased costs and complexity.

Technical terms

Serverless: A type of cloud computing architecture that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage or provision servers.
Microservices: A type of software architecture that breaks down an application into smaller, independent services that can be deployed, managed, and scaled independently.
WS-Deathstar: A term used to describe a complex, distributed system that is difficult to maintain and scale.
Majestic Monolith: A term used to describe a single, large application that is difficult to maintain and scale.