AWS says “break up the monolith” while secretly rebuilding one

Description

The meme is a vertical collage. At the top left is an AWS Marketplace banner in teal and green that reads: “CLOUD-NATIVE MATURITY GUIDE - Evolve from monolith to microservices - Download now.” Adjacent to it is an article screenshot entitled “Return of the Monolith: Amazon Dumps Microservices for Video Monitoring.” Below, large black text states: “Amazon moving from serverless to monolithic architecture while telling other companies to evolve from monolith to serverless.” The bottom half uses the classic “two red buttons” comic panel: the left button is labeled “Adopt Monolithic Architecture,” the right one “Promote Serverless.” A sweating, white-gloved cartoon superhero hesitates, and the final frame shows the blurred-out hero’s face with the caption “AMAZON.” The humor highlights the architectural whiplash and marketing hypocrisy senior engineers often observe when vendors advocate microservices while internally reverting to simpler, cheaper monoliths

Common Tags

AWS ArchitectureTradeoffs MicroserviceArchitecture Microservices ServerlessArchitecture Cloud VendorLockIn TechIndustryIrony

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Somewhere in Seattle a team just filed a Jira ticket titled: “Re-introduce single-process cron job - call it AWS Lambda Classic.”

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Somewhere in Seattle a team just filed a Jira ticket titled: “Re-introduce single-process cron job - call it AWS Lambda Classic.”
Anonymous

The real microservice here is Amazon's ability to decompose their architectural principles into independently deployable marketing messages that can scale horizontally across conference keynotes while their own engineering teams quietly merge everything back into a monolith for that sweet 90% cost reduction
Anonymous

Nothing says 'cloud-native best practices' quite like Amazon quietly rewriting Prime Video's monitoring from distributed microservices back to a monolith for 90% cost savings - while simultaneously selling you a 'Cloud-Native Maturity Guide' on evolving from monoliths to microservices. It's the architectural equivalent of a fitness influencer caught at McDonald's: technically they're not wrong about the benefits of exercise, but the optics are *chef's kiss*. Turns out the real serverless was the operational overhead we accumulated along the way
Anonymous

Fifty “independently scalable” Lambdas give you 99.9^50 availability and a tracing bill bigger than egress - sometimes the most cloud-native move is one deployable
Anonymous

AWS: Serverless for your vendor lock-in, monoliths for our trillion-user perf
Anonymous

The cheapest service mesh is a function call - when p95 cost beats p95 latency, even Amazon reaches for a monolith
Kademlia 3y

Engineering vs Marketing
@maggelia 3y

Well I mean if you actually read the blog post, they did not back out from microservices on Amazon prime, they just switched to a monolith in a particular implementation which didn't make sense to begin with
1. @oljimenez 3y
  
  And the new implementation either
2. @lybitel_popochek 3y
  
  Agree, here is the post for those who didn't read: https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90?utm_source=thenewstack&utm_medium=website&utm_content=inline-mention&utm_campaign=platform
@deerspangle 3y

Yeah, some of that shit is devs writing nanoservices which do a tiny facet, and then getting everything bogged down in network overhead. There's always a healthy balance between the two sides
1. @SamsonovAnton 3y
  
  JavaScript guys create a module for each trivial function. Why not create a microservice for each one of them? 😁
  
  dev_meme 3y
  
  Separate functions will struggle hard to create such an amount of overhead as something like "microservice for each and every endpoint"
  
  @SmirnGreg 3y
  
  Great idea!