An update to my microservices rant ...

I spent some time writing something more positive than my previous rant. I hope.

Kids and asynchronous messaging

We've heard a lot recently about asynchronous frameworks. Typically what these really do is prevent or discourage blocking (synchronous) calls; such calls may be made, e.g., making an RPC to a remote service, but the sender thread/process either doesn't block (so doesn't actually make the call directly), or gets back some kind of token/promise that it can later present (locally or back to the receiver) in order to get the response when it needs it. Of course there's a lot more to this which I'm deliberately glossing over, but the point I'm trying to make it that most of these frameworks don't use the term "asynchronous" in the way we might understand it elsewhere. The FLP problem is a reality yet not one with which they tend to be concerned.

It's strange how the mind wanders when you're doing other things because this was precisely the problem I started to think about whilst cooking dinner the other day. With a lot of people believing that "asynchronous" is the way to go (and in many cases they're not necessarily wrong) I'm more often than not unsure as to whether they really understand the full implications. And whilst cooking I was getting frustrated with my kids, both of whom I'd tried contacting by SMS and neither of whom had responded.

So my mind wandered and I made the not-so-huge leap: I'm trying to communicate with them asynchronously. I sent each of them an SMS and I had no idea of it had arrived. Of course I could have added the SMS-delivery ack request to the messages but that can be disabled by the receiver. Therefore, until and unless they responded, I had absolutely no way to know if they'd got the message and were ignoring me, or if it had gone missing en route (SMS isn't reliable, after all). I sent more SMS messaged but with no responses I was left in the same quandary from before.

Now of course I could ring them but if they don't answer then all that does is mean I've deposited a message (voice) into some semi-persistent queue that they may or may not look at later. Another option would be to find someone who knows them and talk with them, asking for messages to be forwarded. By increasing the number of people I ask I increase the chances that one of them will eventually get through and I may receive a response (gossip protocols). However, ultimately until and unless they or a proxy (friend) for them responded (or came home) I couldn't really know directly whether or not they'd received my messages and acted upon them. Asynchronous is a bitch!

To conclude the story - they came home, had received the messages and didn't believe a response had been needed. Dinner was very tasty though!

Monoliths and a bit of a history lesson

Just another cross-post for those interested.

Update: one thing I forgot to make explicit but hopefully comes through in the above post and the earlier one on web-scale is that to suggest is that to suggest application servers (Java or something else) aren't sufficient for web-scale is difficult to justify since many high profile sites do run today quite well on them.