The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwmkerr.com/the-death-of-microservice-madness-in-2018/ <comment><USER2> I think "microservices" is so appealing because so many Developers _love_ the idea of tearing down the "old" (written >12 months ago), "crusty" (using a language they don't like/isn't in vogue) and "bloated" (using a pattern/model they don't agree with) "monolith" and turning it into a swarm of microservices.

As an Infrastructure guy, the pattern I've seen time and time again is Developers thinking the previous generation had no idea what they were doing and they'll do it _way_ better. They usually nail the first 80%, then hit a new edge case not well handled by their architecture/model (but was by the old system) and/or start adding swathes of new features during the rewrite.

In my opinion, only the extremely good developers seem to comprehend that they are almost always writing what will be considered the "technical debt" of 5 years from now when paradigms shift again.

<comment><USER3> I call this the painting problem. Painting the walls of a room seems easy to an amateur: You just buy a few gallons at Home Depot and slap it on. But a professional knows that prep, trim, and cleanup are 80% of the job and they take skill. Anybody can slap paint onto the middle of a wall. What's difficult and time-consuming are making the edges sharp and keeping paint off the damn carpet.

<comment><USER4> So you are saying edge and corner cases are the most difficult?

<comment><USER5> Great pun!

<comment><USER6> Not sure if it's a pun, or the literal etymology of the phrase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Biggest issue with microservices: "Microservices can be monoliths in disguise" \-- I'd omit the _can_ and say _99% of the time are_.

It's not a microservice if you have API dependencies. It's (probably) not a microservice if you access a global data store. A microservice should generally _not_ have side effects. Microservices are supposed to be great not just because of the ease of deployment, but it's also supposed to make debugging easier. If you can't debug _one_ (and only one) microservice at a time, then it's not really a microservice.

A lot of engineers think that just having a bunch of API endpoints written by different teams is a "microservice architecture" \-- but they could't be more wrong.

<comment><USER8> Once when starting a new gig I inherited a "microservices" architecture.

They were having performance problems and "needed" to migrate to microservices. They developed 12 seperate applications, all in the same repo, deployed independently it's own JVM. Of course if you were using microservices, you needed docker as well, so they had also developed a giant docker container containing all 12 microservices which they deployed to a single host (all managed by supervisord). Of course since they had 12 different JVM applications, the services needed a host with at least 9GiB of RAM so they used a larger instance. Everything was provisioned manually by the way because there was no service discovery or container orchestration - just a docker container running on a host (an upgrade from running the production processes in a tmux instance). What they really had was a giant monolithic application with a complicated deployment process and an insane JVM overhead.

Moving to the larger instance likely solved the performance issues. In place they now had multiple over provisioned instances (for "HA"), and combined with other questionable decisions, were paying ~100k/year for a web backend that did no more than ~50 requests/minute at peak. But hey at least they were doing real devops like Netflix.

For me, I've become a bit more aware of cargo cult development. I can't say I'm completely immune to cargo cult driven development either (I once rewrote an entire Angular application in React because "Angular is dead") so it really opened my eyes how I could also implement "solutions" without truly understanding why they are useful.

<comment><USER9> > They developed 12 seperate applications, all in the same repo, deployed > independently it's own JVM.

I've dealt with an even worse system, with a dozen separate applications, each in its _own_ repo, then with various repos containing shared code. But the whole thing was really one interconnected system, such that a change to one component often required changes to the shared code, which required updates to all the other services.

It was a nightmare. At least your folks had the good sense to use a single repository.

<comment><USER10> > then with various repos containing shared code

What source control system?

Also, from the article:

> even though theoretically services can be deployed in isolation, you find > that due to the inter-dependencies between services, you have to deploy sets > of services as a group

This is the situation we are in, like you were.

<comment><USER9> > What source control system?

Git in our case. And our direction was _not_ to use submodules or anything like that to make life manageable. It was pretty unpleasant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is no such thing as "microservices", it's just services, otherwise known as a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A service is a logical grouping of functionality as it makes sense in your business domain. A small service for a large company can be bigger than the entire product of a startup; there is no standard unit of measure.

Computers also don't care how code is deployed and different services can be bounded by classes, or namespaces, or assemblies, or packages, or processes, or completely separate APIs reached over the internet on the other side of the planet.

Microservices can perhaps be defined as more of a deployment model but even then it's 99% about the team and organization structure. As companies get larger, there is a trend towards smaller teams in charge of separate functionalities that create, deploy, and operate their own service. This can be effective in managing complexity and creating efficiency, although definitely not absolutely necessary.

All that being said, outside of the major software companies, I have seen exactly 0 uses of microservices where the benefits were worth the effort, if any benefits even appeared at all.

<comment><USER12> "microservice" is certainly a buzzword, but it's not just service-oriented architecture. Mircoservice architecture is modular design, with all the advantages of effectively infinite scale, incredibly flexible orchestration, and the resilience provided by the public cloud providers. It has it's own set of challenges, and it isn't the right solution for every problem. But it can be fantastic when used properly. I've written plenty of well performing API endpoints in microservices, and I've also done a fair bit of business process automation with them.

<comment><USER13> And how is that not also service oriented architecture? That's also supposed to be modular and one of the reasons for splitting out service is to scale. You can then place those services in a cloud...

<comment><USER14> Microservice architectures are a sub-category of SOA.

Many of the same reasons to use them apply to both, but with a finer granularity on what is being hosted where and how it is scaling with microservices. Scaling a service with multiple facets going through it gets tricky, hence a desire for a more appropriate modularity.

"Placing services in the cloud" kinda papers over why microservices and cloud- native apps hang together so tightly... Leveraging cloud-provider capabilities (message queues, streaming services, specialized DBs, etc), often introduces new kinds of scaling, new requirements, and new deployment needs at the _component level_. Particularly if you're working in multiple clouds or a hybrid environment or with teams in different organizations... Tech stacks might diverge at the component level, developer competencies diverge, maintenance routines and monitoring and the rest of it too.

A thin service wrapper in front of DynamoDB is gonna have a different scalability story than a DoItAll service on a VM that can also write to DynamoDB. Especially if the service is used by multiple apps, or customers in addition to apps. For a SaaS outfit that can be make or break.

<comment><USER15> "Message queues, streaming services, specialized DBs, etc" have no intrinsic properties making them "cloud-provider capabilities".

All of these "cloud-provider capabilities" are just normal software that you can run on your own hardware. In one or two cases, the software was first exposed via a particular provider's platform, but similar, and very likely superior software that accomplishes the same goals, is now available for self- hosting (Dynamo -> Cassandra or Riak, for example). That's about as strong as the connection gets.

It doesn't follow that "microservices and cloud-native apps hang together" because the cloud provider charges you a lot of money to access their Redis server, when you could run your own Redis server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Background… I've been on good and bad projects that used microservices, and good and bad monolithic projects.

The madness is going away but the microservices are staying. There are some rationales for microservices that are conspicuously missing.

1\. Fault isolation. Transcoder stuck in a crash loop? Upload service using too much RAM? With microservices, you don't even really have to figure out what's going on, you can often just roll back the affected component.

2\. Data isolation. Only certain, privileged components can access certain types of data. Using a separate service for handling authentication is the classic example.

3\. Better scheduling. A service made of microservices is easier to schedule using bin packing. Low priority components can be deprioritized by the scheduler very easily. This is important for services with large resource footprints.

The criticisms remind me of the problems with object-oriented programming. In some sense, the transition is similar: objects are self-contained code and data with references to other objects. The 90s saw an explosion of bad OO design and cargo cult architectures. It wasn't a problem with OO design itself. Eventually people figured out how to do it well. You don't have to make everything an object any more than you have to make everything a microservice.

<comment><USER17> WRT #2. Data isolation argument.

it is not clear to me, why data isolation is your view, is exclusive to microservices.

I have build non trival RBAC+ABAC authorization platforms, using PDP and embedeabble PEP, and did not find that it was useful by micro services only. And I did not feel that it can only be called via 'micro service' pipeline.

In a way the Authorization is a separate service, yes, but it should be offering an embeddable PEP (policy enforcement point) that one can embed (link or call out-of-process if needed), from pretty much anywhere (monolith, or any runtime component).

Authorization decisions require very very low latency, as you are authorizing pretty much every data or function interaction.

In fact, for data interaction, authorization engines offer SQL- rewriting/filtering -- so that the actual 'enforcement' happens at the layer of database you are using, not even at the layer of the component that's accessing the data.

<comment><USER16> I think you may have misread my comment. I said "authentication" and you are talking about "authorization".

Authentication can be very easily centralized in a separate service, authorization is a completely different beast. Authentication often involves access to high-value data such as hashed passwords, authorization does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I found out recently that people too often think about microservices in context of broader solution like it would be one app, just scattered around. I did that mistake in the past, either. The longer I work with microservices the clearer it is to me that teams implementing them should forget about the big product, just focus on the service, as it would be product itself. Assume that anyone can use it, for any purpose they like, as long as they stick to the contract that is, and you'll be fine.

I tend to have two layers of design, now. One - big picture, which treats services anonymously. Just black boxes that respond to input. The goal here is to build solution like kids are building stuff from building blocks.

Other layer depicts services, as separate beings. They treat all their clients anonymously. They have a contract to fulfill and whomever plays by the rules can be served all right. They should be treated as completely separate projects, have their own backlog, release strategies, etc.

Now, if you would have a product that utilize certain data, would you allow some anonymous guy from the internet tap to it directly? No need to answer, I guess.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER19> IOW, good, clean function composition.

<comment><USER20> While this is a simplification, I often catch myself thinking: isn't programming creating functions and functions of functions and that all way down? And on each layer we call them differently because of the context we're in.

Input --> Stuff happens --> Output

Again, it's a simplification, although to be fair, I sometimes don't see how -- other than that I'm feeling that I'm ignoring context too much (e.g. underlying hardware or networks or REST API endpoints).

<comment><USER21> And not just programming - all of computing really. Logic gates are composed into more complex ones that are composed into even more complex ones and so on upwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just for the record, I'm one of the people who thought that putting a CORBA ORB inside GNOME was a _fantastic_ idea. We're all young once!

Microservices are just another way for us to do premature subsystem decomposition -- because we _always_ think that we can build components with stable APIs that will be small, clean and reusable. It's even more fun to put that subsystem into a different process because, who doesn't like a little bit of extra latency in their processing? I jest, but it's not such a silly idea. By making sure everything is in another processes and using the most inefficient IPC system available (TCP/IP), you ensure that nobody is going to do stupid things similar to what people tend to do with threads. The multi- processing aspect appeals to people because it helps them break down the problem into isolated chunks and reason about them.

The key here, though, is to realise that you almost never need multi- processing. The design challenge is actually the same whether you isolate your processing in different processes or not. However, it's _much_ easier to refactor your code when you haven't put road blocks in your path first. If you are doing that, then it is easy to extract the functionality into a separate process if you need to (or even a thread if you happen to work in an OS that thinks that thread processing should be more efficient than process processing).

In short, don't practice "I must protect myself from the stupid programmers" programming and instead concentrate on writing good code with your coworkers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Best use I've found for microservices is highly isolated and well-defined stateless functions which make a significant (read compute intense) change to some data and drop it somewhere else e.g. image compression.

Now you can use this microservice anywhere and just change a few params in how you call it and you have avatars, thumbnails, etc.

<comment><USER24> So basically a library? :)

<comment><USER25> It's like a library that you can call regardless of language ecosystem.

I joined a company that had a large, old, and mature selection of services written in PHP. If I'd tried to rewrite that mature code in a different language I probably would have wasted a lot of time for little benefit. If I'd had to write new code in PHP just to access old code as libraries that would have been a problem too. But functionality was exposed over HTTP APIs that could be used from any language, any runtime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've delivered two major applications (400k users, critical internal apps) using micro-services in the cloud reducing cost and increasing continuous delivery capabilities.

There are definitely special cases, but overall, after 33 years building software, domain driven design, PaaS, micro-services, and continuous delivery is the most productive paradigm I have ever seen.

<comment><USER27> Please go on. Can you provide details?

<comment><USER28> Not the OP but also having worked on multi-million user apps, off the top of my head: zero downtime deployments, small failure domains (if you make a bad update to a service, only related functionality suffers, the rest keeps working), frequent small deployments (like, several times a day), easy and quick integration testing (cause you only have to test the functionality of one service, not the whole system), easier debugging, cause if one functionality isn't working, it's easy to analyze only the logs of the service responsible for that functionality (and optionally move to others later, having identified some part of the cause). Also, every microservice is a new clean slate, you can quickly learn from your mistakes and try out new approaches. (Not diametrically different, but you have the ability to iterate more)

Edit: another one, is that if you keep the microservices actually small and well described by an API, you can easily, quickly and safely heavily refactor/rewrite old services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's a ton of stuff here -- enough for a book or two. I loved the article although I might take issue with several of the smaller points. It's way too much to go into on an HN thread.

There's just so many topics that all come together here: stateless programming, pure FP, NetOps, DevOps, and so on. It feels like one of those cross-discipline discussions where it's either really simple -- or really complex. In fact the core skill here is managing complexity across multiple domains up and down the entire stack. It all depends on the fine details and which choices you make.

I just finished a really good book which may seem unrelated to the current topic but actually is spot on. It's "Domain Modeling Made Functional" It uses F#, but the principles involved apply no matter which language you're using.

[https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made- functi...](https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional)

<comment><USER30> Hi Daniel,

It's weird you mention that, I was just chatting to a colleague the other day on this topic, and I rooted out this old article which I loved:

www.slideshare.net/ScottWlaschin/ddd-with-fsharptypesystemlondonndc2013

I was lucky enough to work on a big F# project a while ago and really enjoyed the experience, it was the first time I'd done any functional programming in a professional context and I miss it now that I'm doing more JavaScript and Node.js!

Thanks for the kind words on the article, much appreciated!

<comment><USER29> Hey Dave,

No problem. There was a ton of good stuff in there! I saved it to refer back to it later. :)

As a tech coach, I teach good programming skills, which mostly ends up being TDD and other good coding skills for OOP folks. But I've become a huge pure FP fan over the past decade, learning it all on my own just by struggling through it.

So as a coach, I'm seeing more and more of these microservice train wrecks. I'm also seeing a ton of people who don't understand microservices come online and bitch about how they don't work.

Wlaschin's book goes into building a pure FP system from the top-down -- something I never considered doing (I've never coached or worked in a large pure FP shop). Of course, if you build it out that way, it really doesn't matter how you splice up the code or where it goes. You can do monolith, serverless, microservices, whatever.

I liked the process described in the book a lot. It describes to me how you can have 50 people and 100 microservices and make it all work. (Although everything you point out is still an issue, many of the pure FP techniques mitigate them.) Feels a lot like BDUF, though, which kinda bugs me.

I sat down with Uncle Bob last month and spend a week showing him F#. TDD didn't seem to work that well, but maybe I missed it. There's just nothing to test in simple transforms, and you want to keep using simple transforms as much as you can. I think we need to evolve a TDD-like process for growing systems in pure FP from the ground-up. I'll probably cogitate on this for a few years and end up writing something. If you know of any good resources, please send them my way!

<comment><USER31> Personally I have learned that TDD and unit tests are only useful in OOP settings that have side effects and have mutated state overtime. But with a more FP approach all you need to do is verify the feature works since you know that state can't change the output.

I kind of also feel that TDD has a kind of cult like following, especially with the Rails crowd

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_complex...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_complexity)

Broadly speaking, microservices make small, limited changes/update less complex, and large, sweeping changes/updates more complex.

This is why generalizations like "larger, established organizations [which make mostly relative small changes] should lean more to microservices than smaller, younger organizations [which make mostly relatively large changes]" hold true.

<comment><USER33> This alone almost rules microsevices out for the majority of us from a cost- benefit point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here's my experience. Some features are extremely good as Microservices. And I wanted to use it. But I don't. Why?

1\. Setting up a "Microservices" architecture itself is a convoluted process. If you're not a Netflix or Amazon that will run hundreds of microservices, the up-front cost and time is NOT at all worth it. I would rather just run an app on Digitalocean.

2\. IF I decided to bypass step 1 and just use existing vendors like AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc., first I don't feel good about it because I know it's in each vendor's best interest to implement lockin, which conflicts with my own interest.

3\. Lastly, none of the existing cloud function vendors have good user experience. AWS Lambda, Google cloud functions, etc. all require you to go through all the authentication related stuff before running a simple function, not to mention all the constraints that come with "function based paradigm". Again, definitely not worth it unless you're trying to run hundreds of these functions.

I think part 3 is critical, because I was willing to ignore part 1 and 2, as long as I could get my function up and running really easily. But none of the vendors make it easy. Sure, there are frameworks that let you do that like Apex and Serverless, but those also require setup. I would rather just run a DigitalOcean server for $5 which by the way can run multiple of those services as a regular server, without me having to spend time dealing with the complexities of function servers.

I thought about how this could be improved. Sure there can be some "Heroku for functions" SaaS, but nobody is excited about building SaaS startups nowadays because they know they can't compete with large vendors in the very long run. (Unless you're comfortable with just building a lifestyle business, which is totally fine, but I personally won't rely on a lifestyle business SaaS)

The only way this can be improved is if each root vendors like Amazon, MS, and Google actually implemented better UI, but none of them are really focused on this since the reason they're doing this business in the first place is not for consumers but to make sure they have leverage in this space. (If AWS dominated 90%+ of this market, the rest of the companies will be in a great risk in the long run)

</comment><comment><USER35> I feel like several of the purported benefits of microservices could be realized in a monolith as well.

Independent development - just stick to your own part of the app.

Reusability - write a library

Isolated deployments and deployment velocity - I suppose not isolated but there's no reason you can't achieve great velocity with a monolith.

A less often cited advantage that I do think has a lot of merrit is the ability to choose different languages and tools for different problem domains.

</comment><comment><USER36> What I "love" about some microservice _implementations_ (so not microservices in general), is that people use fast and scalable data platforms to analyze data in microseconds, but then slap a REST API in front of them, ideally with slow authentication and logging (and ideally in a different availability zone), so instead of waiting 20 ms for your metric, you get it in 3 seconds.

I love (without quotes) microservices for their isolation principle, people can kill off/rewrite parts of the system without affecting other parts, written possibly in a whole different language etc., but lets not abuse it. If you put every tiny function behind an API, what you'll get is a slow and unmaintainable mess.

</comment><comment><USER37> Being a veteran programmer,i find it funny how the article sounds like the stuff we used to read back in 2004-2005, during the heydays of spring and EJB.

<comment><USER38> You took the words right out of my brain as I was scrolling through the comments. My internal dialogue literally was "This is EJB all over again", which admittedly may be a bit too much but as they say history never repeats but often rhymes :-)

In this go around I think the value of discreet, well factored services clearly have merit but it's really a question of just how often you truly have something that's a good candidate for this pattern. From what I've seen in some places it's used as a reason to rewrite systems and not worry about doing a good job creating well abstracted software because the integrity of the overall system is some other team's problem.

This article is really well written and does a great job shedding light on the truth. Thank you for sharing.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the comments. When I was writing the article I kept on thinking that really this is just the same old fundamental problem in a new guise, which is in many ways just how to manage component boundaries and dependencies, particularly when you are looking at a system which is being handled by more than one person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The issue with designing an internal service without a consumer in mind is it tends to bloat the functionality and interface to allow for a variety of speculative-at-best use cases. The issue with desiging an internal service with a consumer in mind is that you tend to build a "distributed monolith". It's like a fricken Zen riddle. That's why it takes a master to navigate the middle ground successfully.

</comment><comment><USER40> Appears to be hip to bash microservices now. We have some very clear reasons that keep us on the service oriented path.

\- scaling based on very disparate resource requirements across our api

\- security isolation of critical backend infrastructure

\- language requirements and dependency management

\- accommodating different skills and groups of skills across our organization

</comment><comment><USER41> People talk about building monoliths like it's some simpler alternative. On the JVM it's not.

When I first started with Java one of the coolest things was that I could embed anything. I could embed Elasticsearch in my web service. Wow! Forget services calling each other! I'll prototype real quick with everything in one JVM!

But that proved impossible! :( It turned out that until Java 9, the JVM has a single namespace for all loaded classes. For me this was the greatest driving force for building out smaller services. You had to be very careful about dependencies and couldn't just include Elasticsearch—or even much of anything—in your web service even if you wanted to. You'd be in immediate unresolvable dependency hell. I can imagine the insane artifacts people produce when they try to build monoliths on the JVM. Even with JavaScript now you have one huge flat dependency namespace. Good luck building a monolith.

I can only conclude that the all the people on this thread who are painting "monoliths" as some easy alternative developers are ignoring due to some inexplicable desire to make things complicated have no idea what they're talking about.

<comment><USER42> I think the recommendation is Monolith First

[https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html)

You start with a Monolith and break it out as needed. (i.e. When you find out that is not a good idea to embed Elasticsearch )

You avoid premature boundaries that can become a significant constraint.

<comment><USER41> My experience in attempting to build a monolith—and, oh I tried—was that it's basically impossible.

Forget embedding Elasticsearch for the purpose of running it inside your monlith; just the transport layer drivers (supposing you're not using drivers that work over HTTP) basically add all of Elasticsearch onto your classpath. Good luck building your monolith after that. And that's true for so many things you'd want to use. If you want to build a monolith you basically can't have any dependencies. Or be very experienced in dependency management.

This is why I have a microservice that fronts all my Elasticsearch queries. Its artifact has the Elasticsearch drivers, all other microservices that need access data from Elasticsearch talk to this service over gRPC. Any time I want to upgrade Elasticsearch or change something about a query, I only need to do it in one spot. It's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Nice article but I'd point out two things:

1\. 'Death' is a bit too extreme. I think everybody is excited at first and tries to find an excuse to use microservices. We're assisting to a decline in that initial push, that's all.

2\. I think the point about transactions is fair, as well as the expertise and team concerns, but the rest are mostly "it's too hard and complex". It'll get better with time. I think that being a bit uncomfortable as a dev is not too bad, that's what we're here for (assuming there's a real need of course).

<comment><USER30> Thanks gfiorav for the comments!

1\. I think here I was going for 'death' more in terms of the end of the hype, rather than the approach! 2\. Agreed. As people get more familiar with the patterns, tools and code and so on it does get easier. The point is more that it can be a hell of a journey :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Microservices as a mechanism for mainly code organization are just a bad idea. Build a well-organized monolith first -- structure your code as in-process services so that you can factor those pieces out individually in the future.

I see smaller teams heaping in tons of complexity for no real gain; and actual measurable cost.

</comment><comment><USER45> These two statements don't reconcile:

> Being both a developer and an operator is already tough (but critical to > build good software)

> Yes, with effective automation, monitoring, orchestration and so on, this is > all possible

This argues for having a separate ops team to handle the complexity centrally (e.g. operating a kubernetes cluster, providing standard building blocks), so developers can concentrate on their services.

<comment><USER46> You can and should have a cross-functional team (containing both devs and operators) to build and operate your infrastructure automation. But the operation of the individual services still falls on the teams that own them.

<comment><USER45> Right, but the complexity the author complains about is then not on the individual services' developer teams.

<comment><USER46> That's the point, yes?

<comment><USER45> Right, if you have a strong team supporting orchestration (or outsource to a cloud), the need for every developer to be an operations specialist goes down, yet the team can still support a larger number of services efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Next up, mixing logic and presentation like it's 1999 _cough_ php _cough_ react native

<comment><USER48> Have you seen the talk "Rethinking best practices" from back when React was first launched?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY)

It addresses this and is pretty great in my opinion. Of course one does not have to agree with it but it is not the same as the mess back then and usually the separation of concerns is more about separations of technology than concerns.

As an an example:

Let us say we have a shopping basket up in the top right corner of our web page. For me there is a big difference between the logic of calculating to the total sum of the parts we have in it or collapsing/expanding it. One is "business logic" and one is "presentation logic" and they are not the same.

And I also bet that if for example HTML or CSS had native collapse/expand then people would consider that presentation as well and not to mention all the logic you usually have (loops, conditions) in a normal template language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is a well thought out and well reasoned article.

It resonates on many of the pain points of microservices. I also nearly broke out laughing at his definition of "microservice madness":

> Netflix are great at devops. Netfix do microservices. Therefore: If I do > microservices, I am great at devops.

Because it is so hilariously accurate it's almost painful.

I do want to point out something the author implies, which is that there _are_ benefits to microservices as a pattern...and as a pattern it is likely here to stay. It's an advanced pattern that comes with tradeoffs and complexity increases on the ops side. In the best case you're trading developer complexity for operational complexity and perhaps also getting better reliability (but this is not a guarantee).

Additionally, projects like Kubernetes, Istio, and Envoy are all tools aimed at making certain operational complexities of microservices easier...so the operational trade offs are likely to change dramatically this year.

But in the end we can all still hope that madness dies in 2018 though.

</comment><comment><USER50> One thing I've noticed with microservices is the business rules duplication. Everyone tries to solve their problem so the same rules start popping up (ofc implemented differently and mostly unknowingly) in all these microservices. The problems start when the business requirements change and you need to change all Microservices.

</comment><comment><USER41> Will someone enlighten me as to why a microservice should have no dependent services? Seems reasonable to me.

<comment><USER27> Service dependencies indicate that you're domain is not properly broken down, or that the services are communicating incorrectly. They can share information, but probably better to do so via events and data copy.

For example, you have a centralized security service. It handles the things related to accounts, profiles and group membership. You have a recipe service. It handles things like finding recipes, adding them to "books", etc. The recipes need to be guarded. They are shown only to members of certain groups.

You could have the recipe service call the security service each time to get the caller's groups. Then compare those groups to the allowed groups. If that user service goes down, you're borked.

If you use events instead, you'd keep a copy of the profile and its groups in the recipes. Every time that changes, it gets an event with the details. Now they've decoupled by sharing data async. It is not a perfect system. It can be possible that the recipes service doesn't update. Now a user that should get the data can't.

The trade off with events is that you can upgrade and redeploy services more easily. If you find a bug in the user profile service, bring it down, update and restart. No other service goes down with it.

<comment><USER41> Thank you for the answer.

All of this makes sense but also seems unavoidable to some degree. Seems like a set of tradeoffs you make by going microservies that you should be weary of.

Having services fully state-decoupled via unified log is interesting. I've considered this but it seemed a bit complicated in terms of then being able to scale the services that need, say, local copies of user profiles.

<comment><USER27> It can be, heck it is difficult if you think about service having to have access to a full profile. If it is the case, that service should probably be part of the profile containing service. But you might not need the full profile.

Here's two examples. Provided you don't get much churn in key profile data, you might be able to use JWT to store group membership for example. All services can read the the token. The token provides the groups necessary for the access operation.

Another example is only copying parts of the data. My current project has profiles and memberships. Interestingly the app side code doesn't actually use that information directly. A copy of group membership is held in the DB. When the user executes any operation, the queries themselves check for rights. When a use wants to read a list of recipes, part of the query is "and has read permission". The same is true of updates. The system queries for the resource to update. Only those that the user has an explicit right to modify are found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Why is scaling independently a pro? I've heard that argument before and never understood it.

If I have one api that is low throughput and one that is high, say requires 2 and 20 nodes respectively, then you need 22 nodes whether they are two independent microservices or a monolith. I'd think the monolith would actually be easier to manage as you don't have to worry about how to divvy up the resources. All 22 nodes run the same code. Sure you could do the same with a k8s cluster autoscaling (I assume), but still, I don't see how this makes anything strictly easier than a monolith scaling. If anything it seems like one more thing to worry about.

But I've heard the argument multiple times, so wonder if I'm missing something.

<comment><USER52> It sounds like you're conflating a binary barrier with a service barrier here. In your example you have two cleanly defined services which happen to be in the same binary. The issue with monoliths is when they all do the same thing because the code is a big ball of mud that "cheats" by calling shared subroutines and doesn't have a clearly delineated API. Therefore you have only one knob to turn to scale.

The 20+2 distinction isn't clear because each part of the code is causing action-at-distance on the others. Failures become a lot harder to isolate. That's what people mean by scaling is hard with a monolith.

<comment><USER51> That doesn't answer the question though. Suppose the apis are completely independent. Say one is a chess server and the other generates haikus. Granted that's silly architecturally to put into a single binary, but that's not the question. My question is why specifically managing scalability becomes easier when deploying them independently. My thought is that it actually becomes more difficult as you have to manage each one independently, whereas if they were a single binary, all you have to care about is the net sum of your resource needs.

<comment><USER53> Usually because they have different usage patterns.

Chess API is a daily cycle between 10-1,000 TPS and is CPU intensive. Haiku is uaually 1-10 TPS apart from Fridays (when everyone's device gets a new one) and holidays when it spikes to 100,000 TPS and is IO intensive.

Scaling a single service with both these API endpoints being called for different pattens like the above is a pain. Splitting them allows for choosing different host types (e.g. More CPU or Memory / SSD etc.) and makes scaling (especially planned / dynamic scaling) easier.

<comment><USER51> Thanks, and to add to that, it occurred to me that they may have different criticality too. Some services you may want to scale very aggressively because a failure would be catastrophic. Whereas other services may be even more cpu intensive on average but failures are acceptable so you let them run at 90% load. I'd imagine this would be a far more difficult balancing act if they were both in the same process.

For example if you had your chess AI engine running in the same monolith as your web server, it could slow down your response time to the point of timeout. But if they were separate services, your web server could stay snappy and give a meaningful response to the problem. "our ai service is overloaded right now, but here is a nice haiku while you wait."

Though still, I'd think of that as a fairly advanced use case. Not something small projects should have to think about.

<comment><USER42> I think your original question is a good one. It must be thoroughly proven and not just taken as gospel.

You may find cases where decoupling a service is a good idea. That doesn't justify decoupling everything by default. The more you decouple the more rigid becomes the whole system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I took his guide at the end and apparently we are supposed to do micro services, which is good, because we do as an engineering org of 800+ people.

<comment><USER55> And sadly some of us are doing them for no apparent reason with fewer than 10 people

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > In fact, if you have stateless services, then I'd be inclined to consider > skipping microservices altogether and consider using a serverless model.

What? Isn't a serverless model necessarily a microservices solution?

</comment><comment><USER57> It's fascinating to me that people don't point out that you can get many of the benefits of microservices with all your code in a monolith, indeed, all in a single runtime. Of the 4 benefits he lists (1: independent development, 2: independent deployment 3: independent scalability, 4: reusability) you can mostly get 2-4 by deploying your monolith to different server pools that are deployed and routed to independently.

Microservices get to be necessary for large dev teams, but probably a lot later than most teams think.

</comment><comment><USER58> Yeah, finally. uS architectures quickly devolve into a haphazard home-grown variant of an ejb design.

You've gotta tip your hat to Sun, despite the OO crap and XML-itis the underlying ideas were - and are - sane.

Now, just as ejb was rightfully considered massive overkill for all but the most large-scale applications, just as simple servlet based (later on controller, service, persistence designs) we often more than enough to get the job done, same applies to uServices.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think another (important) cause of microservice is politics:

When every department wants the easiest job with max outcome and the boss decides to split the cake equally, then an easy job X can be cut into N services which are usually named "micro", resulting in a huge project of complexity (X/N)^N for each team.

</comment><comment><USER60> Great article, but I'd like to dispute one point:

> A new version of the subscriptions service may store data in the > subscriptions database in a different shape. If you are running both > services in parallel, you are running the system with two schemas at once.

Microservices should manage their own separate data stores and communicate with others through a well-defined API. Only then services can evolve independently, and each team is free to change the internals (including schema migrations) without coordinating with everybody else.

Multiple services sharing the same database is the perfect example of the "monolith in disguise" anti-pattern mentioned in the article, with all of the costs of microservices but few benefits.

<comment><USER32> They _might_ be talking about a slow rollout.

<comment><USER60> If that was the case then it wouldn't be anything specific to microservices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Thumb rule: Divide number of backend engineers by 5 you get optimal number of micro-services.

<comment><USER62> Expected: 50 Actual: 0.4

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> "Real world systems often have poorly defined boundaries" ... I have seen teams getting hit by that multiple times. As usual, it is a bad idea to try to make everything fit a single model before attempting to understand the consequences.

</comment><comment><USER64> So it's backlash time already?

A lot of technologies get a lot of hype over the years. But often the backlash is no less ignorant or fashion driven.

Is there a silent majority of us that look at these hype trends, consider them, and make a level-headed decision to see if they fit our problem? I never got into micro-services, because I worked on small teams and it seemed like over-engineering. But it's an idea that I tucked away in the back of my head, that I'd still use if the situation calls for it, HN backlash be damned. The same goes for nosql databases or dynamic scripting languages or anything else that's now irrationally hated.

</comment><comment><USER65> We are such a totalitarian part of the species. Someone writes about microservices and my next project I'm building services for each feature because some manager heard it increases reliability. The fact is its always science. If you don't want your inconsistent dataset from somewhere else in the corporation taking down your application then chunk a part of the application into your own container to manage calls rather than allowing the event loop to block up. It doesn't have to be 'micro', it has to exist for some reason, if not it is just your developers trying to be cool.

</comment><comment><USER66> My two cents would be that tooling makes all the difference with microservices, especially in terms of developer productivity. Having tooling which allows me to test changes to a microservice locally and easily is a huge win, and without that tooling microservice development becomes much more difficult. Making it easy to test a service locally -- including its network interactions -- lets me be more confident that my code will work in production and reduces a lot of the cognitive overhead of developing one component among thousands.

</comment><comment><USER67> Because I find debating about the pro's and con's about microservices somewhat cumbersome, I tried to let the code speak and record a screencast series on exactly this topics. ([https://www.marcobehler.com/series/9-microservices-the- good-...](https://www.marcobehler.com/series/9-microservices-the-good-bad- ugly) ) Because I feel that especially in the Java world, Microservices are an utter abomination most of the time. Comments more than welcome!

</comment><comment><USER68> At my workplace, the idea is distort, disparage or destroy applications and replace with Spring boot thingie. Voila, now we have a 'Next Generation Platform' based on microservices.

</comment><comment><USER69> Decoupling code/infrastructure is not a bad practice. As it so often turns out to be, "Microservices"/"Monoliths" mean different things to different people, and your mileage may vary. Difficulties may be introduced going either way.

Choosing the right tool for the job is difficult, there are many variables at play. There's a lot of value to people sharing their perspectives/experience about these issues. At the same time, I think the overall discussion shouldn't be so dichotomous.

</comment><comment><USER70> I've often thought that micro-services were more of a software engineering management solution rather than a technical one.

From the perspective of a high-level architect it makes delegating certain types of responsibility a bit easier and potentially reduces the need for communication between teams while maintaining centralized control of the overall system.

However, it always seems to come with such a high overhead that IMHO it's almost never worth doing unless there really isn't another option.

</comment><comment><USER71> I have recently been thinking about doing microservices by simply having a shared MySql DB that all modules connect to.

So for example one developer can create the backend and one developer can create the frontend. The codebases can be completely independent. One could use PHP+Laravel and the other one PHP+Symfony for example.

Frontend and backend would live on their own servers. And simply having the IP, login and PW of the shared DB set in their project.

What do you guys think about such an approach?

<comment><USER72> I've been down that road. Eventually it turns into a nightmare because evolving your DB means making simultaneous changes to multiple applications.

"We think we can drop this column, someone figure out which of our eight apps using this DB might be using it still"

I much prefer putting a single service layer in front of the DB that speaks thrift or protobuf and letting all clients interface with that instead. Evolving thrift services is fairly straightforward and allows you to make changes without needing every app the keep up.

<comment><USER71> How does an additional layer make changes to the DB easier? If a column is dropped what will your layer do when a request for data from that column comes in? What if the request joins it with other columns from other tables?

<comment><USER15> It's better because if you have one application that has authority over that area, you only have to answer this question once.

The answer will depend on the data in question, of course; maybe it is fine to serve stale data for a while, maybe you need to write to one DB, read from another, and combine in-process, etc., until the change fully propagates. But the impact needs to be localized to whatever extent is possible.

If you have several applications accessing the database directly, it makes the database everyone's problem, instead of just the one thing's problem. Then _everyone_ has to know about the downtime and come up with their own strategy to mitigate. They can't say "Well we'll just trust what we get from Service A", because they don't actually get info from service A; they get info from service A's underlying datastore.

Worse, in most cases like this, there will just be one global database for everything, so schema changes, database restarts, etc., necessary for one thing can have negative effects, both direct and indirect, across the entire ecosystem. If Bob's Service decides it needs to do a massive reindexing and Alice's Service is on the same DB, even if they're using completely independent tables, etc., the performance hit is going to affect both. If Bob changes his schema and Alice reads or writes directly to those tables (e.g., Alice's service updates a column in records originally inserted by Bob's service), now Alice has to know about the change, plan for it, and coordinate her deployment in sync with Bob, etc.

That kind of thing is what people mean when they say "distributed monolith". There is no real "private" and "public" space where one service provider could reasonably offer a stable API but change things as necessary on the back-end. Nothing is really independent. All you've done is make a monolith that is much harder to coordinate, manage, debug, and understand.

<comment><USER73> This was the problem at my last job. We had a few applications and each had their own database, but they were all on the same server.

Over time they all learned to reach into eachother's databases. The truth is we had ONE database arbitrarily divided into three schemas, each with different traditions.

As load increased it became a nightmare and a literal single point of failure. If one app misbehaved or took a load spike all the rest would slow/fall down. Even though huge chunks of the applications had nothing to do with each other they couldn't be scaled independently.

We were working very hard, slowly, to detangle it without blowing everything up.

No application should _ever_ have direct access to another application's database. It's going to go wrong. The temptation is too great. And by the time you realize it the technical debt it has caused may be MASSIVE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Agree with the author that Microservices are harder to operate in certain aspects. For example latency tracing with Microservices is harder when you have many services to check latency through, what service call caused the latency. Doing error tracing with Microservices is also harder because now you have to follow a web request through many different Microservices. Microservices in some cases may have worse performance than a monolith. With Microservices data no longer does in local memory or local cache, you have to traverse the network through an API calls to fetch data. Imagine that you have a monolith that can look up data in a hash table that is one memory/cache access versus a micro service network call. In the micro service you have to make a network call for a memory lookup. A memory access may take between 0.5ns-100ns versus a network call may take 10000ns. That Microservices may be between 20000 times to a 100 times slower accessing remote memory in another Microservice than accessing it locally in the same monoliths memory. Thus one could argue that in some cases performance are worse with Microservices than a monolith. You can still scale stateless monoliths buy putting a load balancer in front of the monolith. There is also increased overhead of running Microservices, instead of having one Java process/NodeJS process for a monolith you may have several hundred nodeJS processes Microservices running in Docker containers. Each NodeJS process takes memory for NodeJS itself. An important aspect of Microservices which are good is that they allow a part of the system to be restarted independently instead of restarting a whole monolith. [https://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/people/fox/static/pubs/pdf/j0...](https://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/people/fox/static/pubs/pdf/j03.pdf). Sometimes you may want to rewrite a component that is also much easier to rewrite with Micro services. Compare a Mainframe from the 60s-80s running a monotlith without unit testing / integration testing versus modern micro services with testing. Replacing parts or the whole main frame monolith will be very very scary.

Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know [https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832](https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832)

However I would argue Microservices has been done before the idea is not new. Microservices is a realization of the same principle as that of UNIX/Linux. This is called the UNIX philosophy, Write one program that do one thing well. Make the output of one program the input of the other one.

Microservices are not a new idea, its the reimplementation of the UNIX philosophy for the web.

The UNIX philosophy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

"Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features"." compare with Microservice definition by wikipedia "The services are small - fine-grained to perform a single function."

Improving reliaility with recursive reboots, Microservices on Kubernetes are at least implementing micro reboots in case of component failure. [https://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/people/fox/static/pubs/pdf/j0...](https://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/people/fox/static/pubs/pdf/j03.pdf)

Like most tech Micro services probably follow the Hype cycle [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

</comment><comment><USER75> Looks like Microservices have rounded the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" and heading into the "Trough of Disillusionment"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

</comment><comment><USER76> I use microservices and I experienced many venefits. More in general it follows Unix phylosophy.

</comment><comment><USER77> I use a monolith AWS Lambda function. No need for snowflakes unless some cary huge binaries.

</comment><comment> Chiba-City Reminds me of distributed architectures like CORBA turning into spaghetti in the 90's.

<comment><USER78> Seems like every ten years or so a new architecture comes along and quickly devolves into into being yet another distributed RPC mechanism. There was CORBA, SOAP, SOA and now micro services. All promised to fix what came before and all ended up repeating the same mistakes in practice.

Can any of the old timers here name any predecessors to CORBA?

<comment><USER79> Java RMI, which had the misguided goal of making objects (the whole world was fully in the grip of OO religion) appear the same, regardless of whether they were local or remote to you.

<comment> Chiba-City I was going to mention RMI, but couldn't recall the TLA. Does anyone else remember LANS and Windows NetDDE? That got end user machines involved in "distributed" computations.

<comment><USER79> COM+ also had distributed transactions. I was fortunate not to work with it too much.

<comment><USER78> Was this in the protocol? I thought that was around the same time as DTCC which is pretty good IMO.

<comment><USER79> I believe COM+ came along and subsumed DTCC, but I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> > When I started writing the answer to this question, it turned into a long > description, so I'm actually going to separate it into another article and > publish it a little later.

eheh, on an article about micro service madness

</comment><comment><USER81> Very good article. Though some of the downsides are also problems a distributed monolith could face, but overall I agree with the article. You have to consider the trade offs.

</comment><comment><USER82> For my small team of 2, but with an increasingly more complex codebase, the orchestration of (micro)services indeed causes headaches. There is no silver bullet.

</comment><comment><USER83> Good. More often than not it is overengineering that is blessed by technical management because it means they have seemingly less personnel issues.

</comment><comment><USER84> > If your boundaries are actually not well defined, then what happens is that > even though theoretically services can be deployed in isolation, you find > that due to the inter-dependencies between services, you have to deploy sets > of services as a group.

This is the part I keep getting hung up on. Even with perfect boundaries, there always seems to be a cross-cutting feature that would require touching all of the services.

</comment><comment><USER63> The author omitted an important one: microservices are the new source of spaghetti code.

When trying to implement as multiple microservices something that should actually be a single service—i.e., the ms's are not useful as independent units—answering a single API request is an amazing mess of distributed calls all over the place and unnecessary serialization/deserialization of queries.

</comment><comment><USER85> If you can separate something out into it's own completely independent and reusable module, you should always do so. Also if something can scale by adding concurrency, that is often a good strategy. For example in conferences where every participant is supposed to talk, you can divide them into groups, so many people can talk at the same time but in small groups.

</comment><comment><USER86> microservices bring more advantages for management than technical people.

\- easier to manage (smaller team) \- easier to hire (we can hire good people with different skillset) \- easier to scale \- and so on...

</comment><comment><USER87> Call me back for the Death of Cargo Cult Programming altogether.

</comment><comment><USER33> Someone ping me when HN shows a headline which reads "The Death of JS Madness in ??".

Same issues right? Complexity === pain and we can't seem to grasp this as developers. Are we the most self-flagellating people on the planet?

</comment><comment><USER88> Still really important for scaling teams.

</comment><comment><USER89> what we need is a polyglot PaaS that's only runs microservices, lambda is the closest to that ideal right now.

</comment><comment><USER90> Microservices (in practice) are like polyglot: throwing away type safety for no good reason. This shit needs to stop.

<comment><USER72> You don't _have_ to use JSON-over-HTTP. You can use something like Thrift or Protobuf which gives you statically-typed inter-process communication.

<comment><USER90> You're completely missing the point. I shouldn't be able to connect two interface-mismatched services in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I posted this a few days ago... I wonder why HN didn't keep the original post.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159589)

<comment><USER92> This is the 9th time it's been posted: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Death%20of%20Microservic...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Death%20of%20Microservice%20Madness%20in%202018%20&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER74> An improvement to the Hacker news website would be to compute and compare hashes of weblinks so that the same link is not reposted multiple times. Later posters of links could then be redirected to the first post of a link.

<comment><USER93> It wouldn't work - it's trivial to add meaningless query parameters or anchors that would change the hash but still lead to the same content. And stripping that wouldn't work because some sites use them to route to content.

What _might_ work is hashing the text and outbound link content submitted pages of, and building something like a similarity index of text, metadata and a graph of links, but that would probably still be fragile, and definitely be too much effort for a site with as little traffic as this.

<comment><USER94> They could capture the canonical URL from the meta tags in the page. I don't think they do currently.

<comment><USER93> Assuming a site has one, although most news sites probably do. Facebook Open Graph and other social media tags are worth looking for as well. Unfortunately, they're not always trustworthy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IE10 below 1% market share, Firefox back under 20%, Chrome recovers from losses - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/01/01/ie10-below-1-market-share-firefox-back-under-20-chrome-recovers-from-three-months-of-losses/?fromcat=all <comment><USER3> What percentage of Firefox users use adblock or something similar to filter themselves out of stats like this?

I know that just about everything stat is filtered out by noscript or adblock on my installs.

<comment><USER4> Adblock filters stat services? Like analytics? I did not know that.

<comment><USER3> <http://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/>

Easylist+Easyprivacy cuts out the vast majority of analytics sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been working on SVG animations with d3.js and have to say that the Firefox performance is very poor. I don't use Firefox so I don't know how Firefox performs in everyday use, but I know when it comes to animating SVGs Firefox crawls and chugs along. It is so bad I'm actually going to disable SVG animation by default for Firefox users (there will be a big switch to turn it back on for people who I guess have a better computer than my new 15" MBP Retina).

But maybe the performance problems are why people are abandoning Firefox. It certainly doesn't seem to eat memory anymore the way it used to, and that's good.

<comment><USER6> In a way I too feel Firefox being slower compared to light Webkit browsers, but you must be writing a resource intensive animation if a modern laptop fails to render it fluently.

Perhaps not only in terms of pixels and assets, but full page reflows instead. Can you share some details of your work and requirements?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another useful source for browser marketshare: <http://clicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft is suppose to push IE10 to consumers, thus replacing IE9 on Win7. I would expect IE10 to shoot to at least 10% sometime in 2013, hopefully, closer to 15%.

</comment><comment><USER4> When IE8 goes down like IE7 and 6, I'll light a fire on my living room and jump over it to celebrate.

Other than that, I don't really care. All modern browsers have great JavaScript engines, has decent standards compliance and if you can ignore IE8, it's almost a unified platform to develop for.

</comment><comment><USER9> IE10 below 1%? I guess that will change when the Windows 7 upgrade comes through. And then finally we will have reasonable support for CSS3, WebSocket and ES5 Strict Mode for Windows 7 IE users.

<comment><USER10> But all of those should've been available in IE9. IE seems to be at least one development cycle (of their own) behind. I see Chrome 10 had better HTML5 support than IE10 has now, and it was released around the same time with IE9.

We probably won't see support for WebGL, WebRTC, Opus, Web Audio, WebM, and other features that Chrome and Firefox have for another year and a half, until IE11. I'm going to assume they won't support the web crypto API at least until IE13.

<comment><USER9> >But all of those should've been available in IE9. IE seems to be at least one development cycle (of their own) behind. I see Chrome 10 had better HTML5 support than IE10 has now, and it was released around the same time with IE9.

You have to consider that WebKit has supported many of these things for years, which have just been very recently written from scratch for IE9 and IE10. Come on, give them some credit, they're making a good effort to catch up.

<comment><USER11> I am still pretty confused as to why a company so big as Microsoft keeps shipping a browser that scores a weak forth place in terms of these things.

It also doesn't boost my confidence that they aren't releasing the newer Internet Explorer versions on older versions of Windows (where browsers such as Firefox and Chrome run just fine) making it harder to get a larger part of their userbase to upgrade to the newest (while it's rare to find people who use old versions of Chrome).

<comment><USER9> They do release new versions on older versions, but only those which are still supported. XP isn't, so that's how it is.

<comment><USER12> More precisely, in _mainstream_ support.

<comment><USER9> Yes. Truth of course is that it is only backported to the previous version though. Vista sadly won't see IE10.

<comment><USER12> Again because Vista entered extended support in April 2012.

<comment><USER9> Oh. I didn't know that.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK the standard is 5 years of mainstream support plus 5 years of extended support. The 5 years of mainstream support will get extended if the next version is not released in time (generally to two years after the next version's release).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does Net Apps measure browser market share that they get such huge difference for IE, which they put at 54%, compared to StatCounter who puts it at around 30%? To me the StatCounter numbers seem more accurate.

<comment><USER13> > How does Net Apps measure browser market share that they get such huge > difference for IE, which they put at 54%, compared to StatCounter who puts > it at around 30%? To me the StatCounter numbers seem more accurate.

Apples and oranges. Net Applications measures __users __, while StatCounter measures __usage __. It is entirely possible both are right, and the different numbers are both accurate about what they measure.

It is also possible one or both is wrong, possibly by a large amount - <USER2> don't have any good data against which to validate them (that data exists, but it isn't public - Google and Facebook know the truth).

<comment><USER14> The numbers that matter are your websites' numbers and no others.

I had to make a website for a brand with strong sales in China. The client asked for a full IE6 support "because chinese use IE6 according to X and Y." IE6 support is expensive.

I was quite doubtful, the brand is a luxury one, kinda confidential, so the user had to belong to the new rich class which can afford a real computer. But they did not have any data and did not want me to gather data on their actual website to confirm or infirm my hypothesis.

The IE6 friendly website lauched. The stats reports less than 4% IE7 and less usage (including funny browser derived from IE.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It always leaves me dissatisfied to see the word "popular" in the context of web browsers, when people actually mean to say "ubiquitous".

You know what would be a very interesting statistic?

Take all windows PCs, look at usage of non-IE browsers, then take all Macs, look at usage of non-Safari browsers, then take all Ubuntu PCs, look at usage of non-Firefox browsers. Tally it all up and you'll have a reasonable gauge of popularity, where "popular" is defined as "people actively choosing this browser over the default one".

I strongly suspect Chrome would utterly dominate that statistic.

<comment> glass- > I strongly suspect Chrome would utterly dominate that statistic.

Of course it would, because you would be ignoring a chunk of the other browser's users but counting each and every Chrome user.

<comment><USER15> Interesting point, but I have to disagree. Notice I have counted windows, Mac OS and Ubuntu but I left out Chromebooks since they are browser-locked. As such there are instances of Chrome I'm excluding.

<comment><USER16> You're missing the point.

What you're really trying to do is statistically correct for "defaultness"; i.e. remove the users who would actually prefer browser X but use browser Y because it's the default. Your methodology isn't a sound way of doing that, because it also excludes users who use the default browser on their operating system _because they prefer it to all others_. To be sound, your methodology would need a way to not count the former users while leaving the latter users intact.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


David Brin: Distinguishing Climate "Deniers" From "Skeptics" - <AUTHOR> http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2010/02/distinguishing-climate-deniers-from.html <comment><USER3> As someone who deeply respects David Brin (the author), I am deeply disappointed in this post.

The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically.

It's far easier to kill the messenger. As Homer Simpson said "let's go burn down the observatory so this never happens again" (after the meteor strike).

Not that I'm saying Fox isn't or can't be biased but to dismiss everything they ever broadcast just because it's Fox is a far more untenable and ludicrous position.

The bias here is even more obvious when a comparison is made between those skeptical of HGCC to the tobacco proponents of years gone past.

Apart from the obvious emotional connotations this attempts to conjure let me put it this way: the Roman Catholic Church was wrong and Galileo was right. But that doesn't _automatically_ make Catholics wrong in any subsequent dispute.

The biggest fallout from the CRU email hack was how it shone a light on what is basically a subversion of the scientific process: prestigious journals failing to enforce their standards (Nature requires publication of raw data but published AGW articles without it and ignored requests by third parties for Nature to procure it from the authors), blacklisting of journals that publish climate-skeptic works (mcCarthyism basically), failure of the peer review process, selective sampling, obstructionism and deliberate efforts to defeat FOI requests.

This alone should be serious cause for concern from anbody regardless of their position as global policy and billions of dollars are being committed to what is at best a questionable scientific process.

The onus isn't on skeptics to prove AGWists wrong. AGWists have postulated an hypothesis and the burden on them is to prove it. Creationists fall victim to similar fallacies.

<comment><USER4> > The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and > other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically.

It's amazing that a person can make the claim that it's ridiculous that there could be any widespread foul play amongst mainstream climate scientists - <USER2> are you, some kind of conspiracy nut? Then in the same piece, the person will turn around and point out that it's incredibly obvious that there must be widespread foul play and collusion between oil producers, Saudi Princes, the Republican Party, and Fox News.

How do they do that with a straight face? Climate science is a much smaller, much more unified community with only a few major journals and a generally accepted and favorable political position. Industry, politics, media, and foreign governments have widely different and diverging goals. So they claim it's impossible that the small, similarly backgrounded group with similar goals colludes and you'd be a conspiracy nut for even suggesting that it might be possible. And at the same time, they claim it's incredibly obvious that the large, not unified, competing goals groups are colluding. How the heck do they do that with a straight face?

<comment><USER3> > It's amazing that a person can make the claim that it's ridiculous that > there could be any widespread foul play amongst mainstream climate > scientists

Actually I referred to the CRU in particular. You know, the source of the emails.

Pointing to share ownership (7%?) by Saudi princes as proof of anything is the scientific equivalent of the boogeyman.

> Climate science is a much smaller, much more unified community

Some might argue that it's easier to collude the smaller the group gets.

My main point is that the so-called Climategate emails demonstrate a failure of the scientific process. Lack of transparency is a huge problem that everyone should be concerned about regardless of their position.

<comment><USER5> You guys get that you're both on the same side, right? Climatologists are conspiring to take over the world and all that? Just thought I'd save you some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a reciprocal duty on the part of responsible climate change supporters to admit that data has been destroyed to prevent it from being analyzed by skeptical researchers, and that there has been a explicit, documented campaign to destroy the professional reputations of journals which publish papers critical of what is often called the consensus?

If there is no such reciprocal obligation, I'd be interested in knowing why not, because both of those are documented in the "Climategate" emails and subsequent follow-on investigation. (e.g. The data that Jones threatened to destroy rather than allow to get hit with a Freedom of Information request was indeed requested and is, indeed, beyond recovery.)

<comment><USER7> Yes, there have been mistakes and imperfect scientists working on climate change. But you can find such foibles in nearly every scientific field—and very rarely do they shake the foundations.

For example: evolution. I hope we can all agree that evolution and natural selection form a stunningly successful model of the diversity found in the natural world. This is the position of virtually every biologist and is really only opposed by fundamentalist crazies. Despite this, there have been many mistakes in the history of evolution (for example, the Piltdown Man) that have served to weaken its public credible. However, despite these errors there was never anything fundamentally wrong with the underlying theory.

Scientists make mistakes, for both good reasons and bad. But to use a few isolated incidents to cast aspersions on an entire field suggests that you have already come to a conclusion and are looking for evidence, however tenuous, to support it. Your criticisms are at their heart intellectually vacuous and are not sufficient to cast down decades of research by thousands of very smart, dedicated people.

<comment><USER3> "Making mistakes" as you call it is a white wash.

Refusing to publish data, actively obstructing efforts to get that data, selective sampling and black-box "massaging" of raw data essentially invalidate any conclusion drawn from that data.

The essence of the scientific process is reproducability. Anything that isn't reproducible or at least testable is worthless. Anything built on it is worthless.

It's like some physicist somewhere announcing to the world "I've proven the existence of the Higgs Boson" and then refusing to tell you how he did it.

<comment><USER8> In relation to the physicist analogy, isn't there in this case a lot of other physicists saying that they saw similar things?

<comment><USER9> Science is not a democracy. It's a method for deriving knowledge from observation. We need the observations to evaluate the conclusions, not a bunch of hearsay. If other scientists are seeing the same things they should provide the data and methodology so that it can be evaluated independently.

<comment><USER8> That's true - science is a method for deriving knowledge from observation. So, if many scientists are observing, one scientists' secrecy and falsification does not make the other findings "worthless".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me it's those who feel the need to label that are the problem. If someone is making an easily refutable argument than refute it. That's how an intelligent, civilized person makes their case.

Name calling is the tool of children and the irrational

</comment><comment><USER11> Well I am not sure it is 100% consensus (there are dissenters); so this seems to fall for some of it's own fallacies. :-p

<comment><USER12> There's not 100% consensus the sun will rise in the morning or that Earth is round.

Not to mention the embarrassing fact of how many Americans truly believe dinosaurs and cavemen were on the Earth at the same time about 6,500 years ago.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. But I was more concerned with his continued use of "100% consensus" - it felt like a "shouty argument" and out of place in a piece which was discussing the rationality of the skeptics argument :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If we look at the arguments for or against vigorous action on climate change, there really is an overwhelming weight on the side of taking action.

And that's the case even if the climate change argument were a weak one (and it isn't) since the remedies have so many ancillary benefits. In truth, most (though not all) offered solutions should appeal to both deniers and skeptics for reasons having nothing to do with climate.

Yet meaningful action seems impossible.

So we come to this:

If the weight on one side of the teeter-totter is overwhelming,

And yet the teeter-totter won't budge leaving good solutions in the air and stagnation firmly rooted...

Then we must consider that the teeter-totter is broken and/or a new fulcrum is needed.

I'm not trying to be mysterious here. It just seems a good analogy.

In which case, the solution isn't piling on more good arguments...

It's to find out what's wrong with the teeter-totter and get to fixing it.

<comment><USER14> And if the teeter totter shows he is as light as a duck, burn the denialist !

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm tired of all the labeling, and I don't care much for the article with it's circular argument about 100% consensus among all experts. But I'm all for his proposal of common ground:

"we need more efficiency and sustainability, desperately, in order to regain energy independence, improve productivity, erase the huge leverage of hostile foreign petro-powers, reduce pollution, secure our defense, prevent ocean acidification, and ease a vampiric drain on our economy."

I could quibble with some of his colorful language (eg, how desperately?), but the principle seems sound: we would benefit from greater energy efficiency and improvements in alternative energy sources regardless of their effect on global warming. Is there anyone here (either side) who disagrees with this? If so, why?

<comment><USER16> Hoping that the politicians will do the right decisions for the wrong reason won't do. The AGW scare has compelled governments to direct resources towards reducing CO2 while neglecting other environmental issues. The lower bound of food prices has doubled because more bio fuel means less food and this is causing death and starvation in third world countries. A lot of windfarms have been built which is probably the most expensive and most unreliable source of energy on the planet. Furthermore projects about geological carbon storage (pumping CO2 underground) are currently being planned. And then there is Cap And Trade and the Carbon Swaps. The tax payers will not be able to get rid of this schemes as long as CO2 is used as a benchmark for measuring environmental impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This particular argument is stupid and pointless.

To an intelligent person who understands the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, the real questions are "How much?" and "How fast?"

My understanding of climate science is that we don't yet have accurate enough models to make anything more than wild estimates of the economic costs of climate change.

Once we do have such data, nobody will care about what David Brin said.

<comment><USER18> "My understanding of climate science is"

Care to elaborate what your understanding of climate science is?

<comment><USER17> "My understanding" means what I understand of it, which obviously not very much, because I'm not a researcher myself.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a SaaS template for Python - <AUTHOR> Is there a SaaS-in-a-Box template for python  (like Spark for Laravel/PHP or Bullet Train for Ruby on Rails) ? <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/nickjj/build-a-saas-app-with- flask](https://github.com/nickjj/build-a-saas-app-with-flask)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is an educational course. I am looking for code templates.

<comment><USER3> What code templates? Multi-tenant code templates? Payment-gateway code templates? AWS Infrastructure code templates?

SaaS has absolutely nothing to do with "code". Do you even know what SaaS stands for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a great idea. The closest I can think of is hacking something together with Django.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a hacker news toolbox? Pls validate the idea - <AUTHOR>

Inspire by two recently HN posts.
If the answer is yes, I'd like to use that toolbox to check whether a toolbox already exists and no need to ask the question :)
What are you working on? A hacker news toolbox
Who would use your product?
1) "Any hackers wanting to build some new stuff would better check this toolbox. If there is one satisfying your needs, then pls don't reinvent the wheel unless you have good reasons.
2) Any hackers wanting to find some tools for their needs can check this toolbox. There are some great tools which are hard to be discovered as time goes because not every tool can make them famous, e.g. small audience. But you may need it someday."
How do you know customers need what you're making? How do you know people want this?
1) "Had I known about this I probably wouldn't have built Poll... I just wanted something elegant that didn't require registration... Good work!" poll.lab.io said this to tally.tl. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8412791
2) "I'm looking for a plugin posted here some time ago. There was a little plugin posted here a little while ago, probably not longer ago than at most 2 months." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8409646" <comment><USER2> Excellent idea.

Not completely sure what scope you have in mind.

It reminds me of two things:

1\. Tools of the Trade: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235137)

they do an edition per year.

2\. and somewhere there is a google spreadhsheet of all hacker news derived websites (all the guys who scrape hacker news to build "derivatives").

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. Great to seed the initial db.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The poll is here: [http://poll.lab.io/dcla2GhYRr0lDLV7icEDMw](http://poll.lab.io/dcla2GhYRr0lDLV7icEDMw), but I hope you can also vote this post so I can get more opinions.

<comment><USER2> One idea: it might be worth asking for email addresses. You already had 27 people interested. Build a quick unbounce page and get the emails so you can recontact.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A search engine for python syntax - <AUTHOR> http://alts.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I recently found myself spending a lot of time searching for syntax. Hence, I built a search engine that returns the snippets you are looking for right away. I would love to get your feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is great! I added it as a custom search engine with the keyword 'py' in chrome. Just right click the search field and click 'Add as Search Engine'!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, Great! This is amazing. Do you think you'll expand the search into the police database? I could really use a way in there

</comment><comment><USER4> This is cool dude! Are you planning on expanding beyond Python? I use C/C++ at work, and this could be very useful for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! But before working on adding support for all languages I wanted to have an idea if this was something people would find useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> awesome! is this code on github?

[https://twitter.com/RealPython/status/540200875797405696](https://twitter.com/RealPython/status/540200875797405696)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for tweeting! Not right now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is "syntax" the right word there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Please elaborate.

<comment><USER7> instead of "search over syntax", something more specific like

        "text, wildcard or regex search"

over (as an example)

        "stackoverflow, standard library, langauge spec for cpython,
        400 most popular libs on github/pip/package index/ (whatever)"

e.g. here's a search engine for scala that lets you use type signatures: [http://scalex.org/](http://scalex.org/)

_________________________________

really useful search engine, just needs clarification on the database contents and what kinds of searches you can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> amazing! in a python intro class now and this will definitely help with my assignments!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am happy this can be helpful to you!</comment></comment>


How a nerdy kid from nowhere self-published and got noticed by Larry Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.federicopistono.org/blog/how-a-nerdy-kid-from-nowhere-self-published-a-best-seller-and-got-noticed-by-google-ceo-larry

<comment><USER2> not sure there is much new here. Interesting story for the guy</comment>


Restrictions on Payday Loans Hurt the Poor - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-09/restrictions-on-payday-loans-hurt-the-poor <comment><USER2> The government should try to prevent the abuse of poor people.

If there is demand for payday loans limiting supply of credit will only push people into the hands of loan sharks, crime, prostitution or nastier stuff.

What the government could do is increase the supply of credit - the US borrows at sub zero levels right now - so they could just funnel some of those money into the poorer communities.

Poverty is like cancer. It kills the social body and must be stopped.</comment>