I’ve been reading up on microservices in order to broaden the language I use when discussing similar concepts and came across the term Microservice Chassis.
As I was reading about it my first thought when relating it to Elixir was “oh, like Umbrella projects”.
Is it fair to consider an umbrella project a form of microservice chassis? I understand that several OTP apps talking to each other does not a microservice architecture make, but in loose terms are they equivalent?
edit – Updated “app” to “project”, thanks @peerreynders
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Don’t you mean umbrella project - as in the OTP app being the equivalent of a microservice? I’d say by default it is not - however there is nothing stopping you from moving functionality under the umbrella to end up with the equivalent of a microservices chassis.
But I think ultimately one has to be careful with just chasing the microservices buzzword.
https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/711662152633995265
I maintain that in Erlang/Elixir you should be able to get many of the benefits of microservices without having to invest in the usual operational overhead that typically is associated with microservices - however the cost is developer/design discipline. For example the responsibilities and interactions between the OTP applications need to adhere to general service-oriented principles (nevermind the SOA sticker - the principles still apply - it’s the “SOA tooling” that was evil).
Read this yet?
Dawn of the Microlith - Monoservices with Elixir
To a certain degree the appeal of microservices seems to be the illusion that you don’t have to throw your core competencies away - yay, I can still use Java - while not realizing that the organizational and infrastructure changes are so massive that “learning to use a new language”, even something as different as Erlang/Elixir is a relatively minor concession in order to move ahead at a much more reasonable and sustainable pace.
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Don’t you mean umbrella project
I do indeed, sorry, as you can tell I’m still finding my feet with the terminology.
Read this yet?
Dawn of the Microlith - Monoservices with Elixir
I haven’t, looks very interesting and I’ve added it to my to-read pile!
I agree about chasing the buzzword, this isn’t something I was looking to do, I just wanted to confirm if the term microservice chassis was in any way equivalent to umbrella project.
Cheers!
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