You know what they say: micro services, macro outages.

gotta keep wirth’s law going strong

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What’s next? Femtofunctions

Infinitesimal service. It’s effectively no service but it pays better.

Soooooo… Linux with extra steps.

Cant wait to set up a docker container for a service which takes a string input and transforms it into a number as the output. Full logging, its own certificate for encryption of course, 5 page config options and of course documentation. Now, you want to add two numbers together? You got the addition service set up right?

I feel like this name addresses the problem of services claiming to be microservices when they’re not.

Does that even happen? cat is micro, sed is micro, systemd isn’t and doesn’t claim to be

I’m trying to understand how this is different than a concept I learned in computer science in the late 80s/early 90s called RPCs (remote procedure calls). My senior project in college used these. Yes I’m old and this was 35 years ago.

I was going to write that every function should be a service as sarcasm, then I realized that’s exactly what this article is proposing. Now I’m not even sure how to make a more ridiculous proposal than this.

we’ve been using nano-services for the past 6 months or so. Two different reasons. A codebase we absorbed when a different team was dissolved had a bunch of them, all part of AWS AppSync functions. I hate it. It’s incredibly hard to parse and understand what is going on because every single thing is a single function and they all call each other in different ways. Very confusing.

But the second way we implemented ourselves and it’s going very well. We started using AWS Step Functions and it allows building very decoupled systems by piecing together much larger pieces. It’s honestly a joy to use and incredibly easy to debug. Hardest part is testing, but once it’s working it seems very stable. But sometimes you need to do something to transform data to piece together these larger systems. That’s where ‘nano-services’ come in. Essentially they’re just small ruby, python, js lambdas that are stuck into the middle of a step function flow in order to do more complex data transformation to pass it to the next node in the flow. When I say small I mean one of the functions we have is just this

def handler(event:, context:)
  if event['errorType']
    clazz = Object.const_set event['errorType'], Class.new(StandardError)
    raise clazz.new.exception, event['errorMessage']
  end
  event
end

to map a service that doesn’t fail with a 4xx http code to one that does fail with a 4xx http code.

You could argue this is a complete waste of resources, but it allows us to keep using that other service without any modifications. All the other services that depend on that service that maps its own error types can keep working the way they want. And if we ever do update that service and all its dependencies, now ‘fixing’ the workflow is literally as simple as just deleting the node and the ‘nano-service’ to go along with it.

I should note that the article is about the first thing I discussed, the terrible codebase. Please don’t use nano-services like that, it’s literally one of the worst codebases I’ve ever touched and no joke, it’s less than 2 years old.

We already have nanoservices, they’re called functions. If you want a function run on another box, that’s called RPC.

This is just distributed functions, right? This has been a thing for years. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, GCP Cloud Functions, and so on. Not everything that uses these is built on a distributed functions model but a fuck ton of enterprises have been doing this for years.

Poe’s law strikes again!

Metaservices.