Overly chatty micoservices are definitely an issue.

Changing your mindset to a microservice oriented architecture is not an easy feat, it’s something that took a lot of time for me to fully grasp (back in my architect/developer) days. Yes, you gain overhead that will need to be compensated for. But when do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

Here are some questions to ask during design: How much of this chattiness is because you are tightly coupling these services? Hom much should a microservice be talking between each other? Can you implement an event bus to handle that chatter between services?

Designing an application using microserves but just replicating the monolith application will give you scalability, but will not give resilience. What can you do to overcome that single point of failure? First, no more synchronous calls to these APIs, toss an event over then fence and move on. Degrade your application if the failure is something you can’t overcome, but don’t just stop the application because one API is no longer responsive.

Do you need everything to be a microservice? Probably not. The first thing you look at when moving from a monolith to microservice architecture is what makes the most sense to be moved. How much work can be offloaded to background jobs (using something like sidekiq)?

How do you handle installs? How many packages do we now have to create for this application to work?

There are a lot of questions that have to be answered before moving toward a microservice architecture. On top of that, there is a complete mindset change as to how the application works that needs to be accomplished. If you design your microservice application with a monolith application mindset, you’ll never realize any of the gains by making the move

Do you have more details about this? Lemmy and lemmy-ui are stateless and can be easily scaled horizontally, but pictrs is not stateless and use a filesystem-based database (sled) with lock and it can only be run as a single replica or it crash (if the replica run in the same host and can’t acquire the lock) or will have severe data inconsistency issue (if the replica run in separate host with separate sled database file).

Overly chatty micoservices are definitely an issue.

Changing your mindset to a microservice oriented architecture is not an easy feat, it’s something that took a lot of time for me to fully grasp (back in my architect/developer) days. Yes, you gain overhead that will need to be compensated for. But when do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

Here are some questions to ask during design: How much of this chattiness is because you are tightly coupling these services? Hom much should a microservice be talking between each other? Can you implement an event bus to handle that chatter between services?

Designing an application using microserves but just replicating the monolith application will give you scalability, but will not give resilience. What can you do to overcome that single point of failure? First, no more synchronous calls to these APIs, toss an event over then fence and move on. Degrade your application if the failure is something you can’t overcome, but don’t just stop the application because one API is no longer responsive.

Do you need everything to be a microservice? Probably not. The first thing you look at when moving from a monolith to microservice architecture is what makes the most sense to be moved. How much work can be offloaded to background jobs (using something like sidekiq)?

How do you handle installs? How many packages do we now have to create for this application to work?

There are a lot of questions that have to be answered before moving toward a microservice architecture. On top of that, there is a complete mindset change as to how the application works that needs to be accomplished. If you design your microservice application with a monolith application mindset, you’ll never realize any of the gains by making the move.

Personally, I wouldn’t touch OpenShift. As someone that has a kubernetes cluster hosted at my house on a mixture of RPis, a nas and in VMs, I’m not one to to say what anyone else would do :).

But, that can be overcome, it’s all about designing you application for multiple different installs. You don’t have to have all your services running fully separately. You can containerize each service and deploy to an orchastration engine such as kubernetes or docker swarm, or you can have the multiple endpoints on a single machine with an install package that keeps them together. It’s all about architecting toward resiliency, not toward a pattern for no other reason.

Also, Google has some very good books on SRE for free.