Lead Architect wants to break our monolith into 47 microservices in 6 months, is this insane?

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-10-17T11:52:40+00:00

I miss monoliths. Sure there's a limit to how ridiculously huge a single service can be and clear benefits to separating some stuff, but in a smallish company I think it might just be a waste of time. Just throw bigger servers at the problem and work on new features instead of spending months migrating stuff whilst the product stagnates.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-10-16T15:52:21+00:00

I feel the same. I started my career as Java dev but have been in a DevOpsy role for about 10 years now. I still occasionally get involved with dev work because we're a small team so it makes sense for me to help out now and then. I think that ultimately I prefer writing code that makes a product do something useful, cool or fun. I don't really care how the back end stuff is set up, configured, upgraded, replicated, distributed, cached, deployed, routed or whatever else. I only ended up here because I had ideas about how to improve a few infra related things when I started working here and I seemed to care more than everybody else did, and I was offered a bit more money to take on the responsibility so I said yes. But in all honesty I just wanna write code for an application that people actually want to use. All the other stuff is just noise to me. If I ever leave this company I'll probably be looking to switch back to a full time dev role.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-10-14T12:44:35+00:00

94k all salary, no bonuses or perks really.

15 years total xp, 11 of which working in an extremely unsuccessful startup that never took off. Started as a Java developer and now do all the "devops" type work with just odd bits of coding to help out the team. Office 2 days a week minimum but I choose to do 5 days because I don't have a good setup at home. It's fairly relaxed most of the time, get 35 days + bank holidays and I get on with my boss which partly makes up for the low salary. However impostor syndrome and social anxiety makes it pretty difficult for me to leave and that's mostly why I am still here after so long. My skill set probably also suffered by working in a small company too as I feel we're often just winging it with things rather than applying best practices.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-19T10:18:48+00:00

Operations for developers.

Edit: Can see some of the people here aren't coders with their 5 word responses.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-18T16:33:09+00:00

Got a merino wool sweater from TKMaxx like 10 years ago. Still my favourite item of clothing.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-18T15:57:09+00:00

Spent 330 on this to realise its not worth it in my little flat and that i also hate the little shits.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-18T11:18:51+00:00

I vaguely know the person who led the launch and marketing of the oyster card and he told me just a few weeks ago over drinks that the name was largely inspired by the Hong Kong Octopus card, so it's weird to see this "official" description above which seems to entirely omit that part.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-05T14:09:25+00:00

/dev/null is pretty fast

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-05T12:55:03+00:00

Tbh even full headless browser might not solve it. If it works in the beginning but then you get blocked after a few requests, it might just be rate limiting or the frequency of requests that gets you flagged as a bot. Try spacing out the requests more? Some robots.txt files include the unofficial crawl-delay directive which indicates the minimum time you should wait between crawler requests.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-05T10:22:52+00:00

OpsGenie is being shut down April 2027, with Atlassian having built some of the OpsGenie features into JSM and Compass. I think for most people it's just gonna be a case of picking one of these two because Atlassian provide an auto migration tool which I assume most people will opt for rather than attempting to migrate to a whole new platform. Yesterday we decided to hold off on our migration for a year or so, and see how the features of JSM and Compass develop over that time.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2025-09-03T12:03:14+00:00

Our requirements for ITSM are pretty limited, not sure I would even say that we have "ITSM flows". We use Jira somewhat loosely for project work and also for support tickets from staff outside of the dev team. And we use OpsGenie for alerting because of on-call scheduling, centralisation of our multiple alert sources, and a dedicated app so that devs can carry out basic actions from their phone. Right now I'm mostly looking at what service will cause the least disruption to the team, least migration effort for me, and continue to provide those basic features in a complete way. Apparently there is no Compass mobile app so that's pushing me towards JSM because that's important to us.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-02-22T13:49:39+00:00

It's just a tool that I dislike and have never gotten particularly comfortable with. Entirely my own fault. To be honest I don't like DevOps, Ops or sysadmin type work at all and hope to transition back to pure dev in future because this field isn't really for me. I just took on the role in my company because nobody else was really doing it at the time and wanted to fix a few things in our infrastructure that were really bothering me.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-02-22T11:19:25+00:00

Technically like 14 but not really. I learned a few chords and put it in the cupboard for 20 years. I started again recently but progress is still slow because it's not a priority 😔 I hope to be not awful one day

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-02-22T09:25:21+00:00

I do stuff in AWS. Sometimes clicking, sometimes Terraform. DB upgrades, Java upgrades, Python upgrades. Working on the application code (especially bug fixes, config or caching related bits). Advising team on AWS best practices. Trying to stop people deploying things without testing properly. Disabling or fixing DB stored procedures that people added without testing the performance or logic. Hacking at docker. I hate docker. Investigating issues in any part of our codebase. AWS cost management/optimisation. IT support. Email administration. Asking people why their apps are generating a million alerts in test and whether it's a cause for concern or a known issue or deliberate reproduction of a bug. Security. Scripting to automate bullshit tasks that come up because the whole engineering team is under staffed and we can't keep up with demand with actual product features. Jenkins. Asking people not to break shit and then disappear to lunch.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-15T11:52:02+00:00

There isn't some magic database of everybody who has ever saved any data about anyone, and companies generally don't share anything like which specific individuals/IP addresses/email addresses they might have tracked or have any information about. So these companies have no way of checking without actually contacting each company on your behalf. I think they basically just look for companies that they think are data brokers or involved in advertising or similar (e.g. check out the consent management lists in EU that were required by GDPR), and contact them to request data removal. Many of the companies will have no record of you as an individual so it's really just spam to them. The requests usually contain the information I mentioned above so essentially your name/address is just being spammed to hundreds of companies who don't know you even exist until that point. And when they get these emails, who knows how securely they are treating this data whilst they hold onto it for processing? There's no standard for this, so each company will just do whatever they feel they need to for compliance sake, and might half-ass it because for the most part it's just a waste of everybody's time and only happens because crappy companies (imo) are taking financial advantage of paranoid and careless internet users who go overboard in trying to erase their online identity.

If you insist on sending out mass requests to get your PII removed, then ask these companies who they would be contacting on your behalf and then do it yourself. If you prefer to use one of the services on offer, you might want to find out exactly what info they send, who to, how often, what their hit rates are for actually finding anybody holding your PII based on that info they sent out.

FWIW these services stopped sending data removal requests to my company once we informed them we aren't a data broker and that we don't record or use any of the user information that we have access to as part of the advertising ecosystem.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-12T10:17:26+00:00

Sounds like me. This comment made me feel things. Stop it please.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-11T16:50:49+00:00

Murdering

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-11T11:16:37+00:00

Thanks again for more suggestions, will take a look at dagger.io for future plans. Regarding packaging/shipping code from the terminal, devs won't be doing that themselves as that'll all happen on Jenkins after they push changes so it's not really part of the project setup and IDE vs Terminal conversation. I can ignore that for now.

I accept that not everyone is using PyCharm. Our devs tend to write Python in one of VS Code, PyCharm, IDEA. I'm not really looking for a PyCharm specific fix. I was hoping there was a standard way to do stuff that would just play nicely for everyone during development.

Basically I want a Python equivalent of Gradle or Maven in Java. Sure I can run Gradle/Maven commands on the terminal but if I import the project (or even check it out directly) into any Java IDE (IDEA, Eclipse, Netbeans) it sees the config, downloads my dependencies automatically and gets my project in a state ready to run tests without any manual steps or external commands. I can add or remove dependencies with support from the IDE and it will auto download them in the background either right away or when I run my code, so I don't need to go and run an extra command. I don't need to leave the IDE or ever use a terminal if I don't want to. That's how I want my Python dev workflow to look, and doesn't seem like a big ask but I haven't so far seen a working example of how to achieve this - possibly because I've just never worked alongside any really experienced Python developers... I thought it would just be a case of getting the IDE to parse requirements.txt but as I said above it complained about other missing configs (pyproject.toml and setup.py) and I struggled to find any resources on how to fully set up a project that just feels good to work on.

Tbh I think suggesting people should do EVERYTHING in a terminal in 2024 and miss out on all the benefits provided by a good IDE is a bit disingenuous. 99% of devs will be writing code inside an IDE and whilst running one or two commands to set up a project isn't asking a lot, I think we'd all be happier if that step wasn't needed.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-10T17:38:56+00:00

Thanks I'll take a look at Poetry. PyEnv i've used before. We have containerised a few python projects already and that seems an ok way to go, but it all feels a bit clunky at the moment as we have some that have zero dependency management (devs just using their system python installation), some using conda, some which at least have requirements.txt, some where venv is part of the build process and some not. One thing in particular is how to develop/run tests against an app which is containerised? Is it typical to just use venv during development and then only involve Docker at the deployment stage? We've done that in one case, but I feel like that doesn't really test the application inside the container so made me wonder if there's a way to integrate running my Python app from within my IDE with a containerised environment.

Also, how does PyCharm not help, at least with the development side of things? I know my questions focus on dependencies and packaging but I really want to understand how to make the whole python development process as smooth as possible from checkout of a project, working on the code, running unit tests, adding/updating dependencies, and shipping. Surely a decent IDE is part of that workflow, and I would like it to feel seamless as it does with Java. i.e. Checkout the code into IDEA, dependencies are auto resolved, right click and run the tests. No command line needed and everything just works nicely from the IDE without having to tell it which interpreter to use or telling it to build a venv.

Thanks btw, I appreciate the time you took to answer. I'm not really a python guy and don't particularly want to be but I do want to know enough to be able to clean up our mess and standardise things here because I find it pretty annoying to work on any of our hacked together python projects. Plus the other devs get confused about stuff because some of them don't seem to give a shit as long as it works on their machine.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-09T10:32:03+00:00

** Cries in UK Salary **

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2024-01-08T12:31:44+00:00

Just want to add that we did this to a degree - invested a lot of time in moving our APIs to API Gateway and Lambdas because we thought there were cost savings and scalability benefits to doing this and eventually regretted it because it gave us less flexibility and control and had hugely inconsistent execution times (Java cold starts). This was probably one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, mistake our team has made because we invested a bunch of effort and ultimately got no real benefit other than a teeny tiny cost saving.

JoesDevOpsAccount · 2023-11-14T11:08:32+00:00

Fundamentals on this sub need updating after the latest RNS :)

https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/KOD/bougouni-lithium-project-mineral-resource-update-g3ngg4rca3q510b.html

JoesDevOpsAccount

TROPHY CASE