Right on. AI feels like a looming paradigm shift in our field that we can either scoff at for its flaws or start learning how to exploit for our benefit. As long as it ends up boosting productivity it’s probably something we’re going to have to learn to work with for job security.

• Cloud providers have financial incentive to push microservice architectures
• Cloud providers give corporate consultants statistics like “microservice architectures are proven to be X% more likely to succeed than monolithic architectures”
• Cloud providers offer subscription-based tools and seminars to help companies transition to microservice architectures
• Companies invest in these tools and seminars and mandate that all new projects adopt microservice architectures

This is how it went down with Agile at my company 10 years ago, and some process certifications and database technologies before that. Based on what I’m hearing from upper management microservice are probably next.

From my perspective the corporate obsession with microservices is a natural evolution from their ongoing obsession with Agile. One of the biggest consequences of Agile adoption I’ve seen has been the expectation of working prototypes within the first few months of development, even for large projects. For architects this could mean honing in on solutions in weeks that we would have had months to settle on in the past. Microservices are attractive in this context because they buy us flexibility without holding up development. Once we’ve identified the services that we’ll need, we can get scrum teams off and running on those services while working alongside them to figure out how they all fit together. Few other architectures give us that kind of flexibility.

All this is to say that if your current silver bullet introduces a unique set of problems, you shouldn’t be surprised if the solutions to those problems start to also look like silver bullets.

Sometimes I wonder if international laws against genocide have done more harm than good. When we see atrocities occurring where it’s strategically inconvenient to intervene we look the other way or squabble over legal definitions - anything to excuse ourselves from getting involved. The results are no different than if these laws did not exist, except that we are also complicit in denial, which in itself is a terrible thing.