> No complex dev setup required, or RPC framework needed, it’s the same old monolith, just operated differently.
It seems to me like "operated differently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting that often involves those same frameworks or dev/testing environments. If a monolith used to communicate between workloads in-process, now there needs to be some way for those workloads to communicate between processes, and it has to continue to work in dev. The example in the article mentions roundtripping through something like Redis or Postgres, but now doesn't your dev environment need to spin up a database? What if the communication pattern isn't a shared cache, but instead a direct function call that, say, spins up a new goroutine to process some work asynchronously? Now you need to operate and maintain either an RPC protocol or an event queue, and make sure those things can be started up and discoverable during testing and local development.
It's pretty normal to have a local dev database on your machine. It's how we did it for decades. Are there really developers in the wild now that have never been exposed to working with a locally installed SQL instance?
These days you can even set it up in docker, automatically migrate the database to the latest version and install a bunch of test data. So you can wipe the whole thing and go back to a good state if you muck it up with a bad or ill-thought-out local migration, etc.
Same with redis, etc.
And it's still much, much simpler than a microservice architecture.
You should already be spinning up caches and databases in dev anyway?
I agree though that the article is missing some explicit insight into how this change is handled on the local dev environment. I'm assuming the local dev environment run commands were also updated to be these three commands, one per workload.
Basically, this distinction should be represented throughout all environments, dev/test/prod
It seems to me like "operated differently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting that often involves those same frameworks or dev/testing environments. If a monolith used to communicate between workloads in-process, now there needs to be some way for those workloads to communicate between processes, and it has to continue to work in dev. The example in the article mentions roundtripping through something like Redis or Postgres, but now doesn't your dev environment need to spin up a database? What if the communication pattern isn't a shared cache, but instead a direct function call that, say, spins up a new goroutine to process some work asynchronously? Now you need to operate and maintain either an RPC protocol or an event queue, and make sure those things can be started up and discoverable during testing and local development.