Generated with DALL·E. Prompt: “a complex monolith in a server room, with the faces of IT consultants with suits engraved in it with twisted faces, mathematical formulations about complexity floating around, and with a mysterious malevolent godlike presence in the background”.

On Complexity and Monoliths

Putting microservices (and other architectures) in a realistic light without resurrecting what should stay dead.

Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, in his short story The Nameless City, famously attributed this quote to a mad (fictional) poet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die.

And—yes indeed—here and now I will let the above refer to monoliths (and other phenomena) and not fictive gods sleeping in the ocean, waiting to consume humanity.

This article is reflective and highly opinionated in nature. If you want a more technical, objective approach to concrete solutions and discussions on this matter, then see for example these great books:

• Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach
• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures
• Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

Definition: Oh, and microservices don’t have to equate Kubernetes. For me, at least, that’s an entirely different point. I’ll instead think of function-as-a-service (FaaS) as a purer realization of…