Distributed systems always ends up a dumping ground of failed tech solutions to deep org dysfunction.
Weak tech leadership? Let's "fix" that with some microservices.
Now it's FUBAR? Conceal it with some cloud native horrors, sacrifice a revolving door of 'smart' disempowered engineers to keep the theater going til you can jump to the next target.
Funny because dis sys is pretty solved since Lamport, 40+ years ago.
I suffered through this in two companies and man, it isn't easy.
First one was a multi-billion-Unicorn had everything converted to microservices, with everything customized in Kubernetes. One day I even had to fix a few bugs in the service mesh because the guy who wrote it left and I was the only person not fighting fires able to write the language it was in. I left right after the backend-of-the-frontend failed to sustain traffic during a month where they literally had zero customers (Corona).
At the second one there was a mandate to rewrite everything to microservices and it took another team 5 months to migrate a single 100-line class I wrote into a microservice. It just wasn't meant to be. Then the only guy who knows how the infrastructure works got burnout after being yelled at too many times and then got demoted, and last I heard is at home with depression.
Weak leadership doesn't even begin to describe it, especially the second.
But remembering it is a nice reminder that a job is just a means of getting a payment.
Lamport's website has his collected works. The paper to start with is "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system." Read it closely all the way to the end. Everyone seems to miss the last couple sections for some reason.
Weak tech leadership? Let's "fix" that with some microservices.
Now it's FUBAR? Conceal it with some cloud native horrors, sacrifice a revolving door of 'smart' disempowered engineers to keep the theater going til you can jump to the next target.
Funny because dis sys is pretty solved since Lamport, 40+ years ago.