Such cargo-cult statements never work in absolutes.
Saying that "monorepos are only good for large scale" is pure bullshit, and something that only someone very inexperienced would say.
I'm in a very small company (less than 10 devs) but we still use a monorepo, because we have a set of common libraries for all our products, and having a monorepo helps us update those libraries without breaking anything. On the other hand, some very large companies have tried and have failed.
Monorepos are just a tool. The implementation and the context matters more than anything else.
A monorepo saved our company. When you let every developer have their own personal repo like it's some isolated minecraft instance, you will struggle to create 1 big valuable thing.
Monorepo forces the tough conversations. Maybe the organization should only use 1 language now. Maybe we should talk about code review policies and standardization of other processes since everyone is in the same bucket. Why can't everything just compile to 1 exe?
Another massive advantage with a monorepo if you use GitHub is that you now have 1 issue bucket that covers the entire enterprise. Linking issues to commits is super powerful when this technique covers 100% of your code and exists under 1 labeling scope.
I'm not a fan either. In my opinion to do monorepos right you have to have a lot of tooling to handle all the special cases and scenarios and small teams just don't have the bandwidth so they use off the shelf tools that force them into a specific workflow and they end up at the mercy of the tools.
Like versioning services, deployment of the code base, breaking out new microservices, transitioning to any container based deployment solution. Monorepos aren’t just a nightmare for release management, they’re a nightmare for any sort of single responsibility oriented architecture. I’m really exhausted of “senior devs” that believe they’re architects championing monorepos just because they’re too lazy to change minor versions in a repo.
You have to understand, many of us think microservices is a stupid idea, so the fact that the core of your argument is "monorepos make microservices difficult" is not an appealing argument.
The definition of an ideology is a school of thought that claims to have the answer for everything. What does that tell us about the microservices fan club?
I don't know any online community that esposes some of the ideas I believe about web technology. There's "handmade network" but they don't seem to be much into web programming.
I think you're massively misrepresenting the senior devs you've worked with if you think the reason they've advocated for monorepos is because they're "too lazy to change minor versions".
If a monorepo puts a barrier in the way of turning everything into a microservice, then all the better, as far as I'm concerned.
Everything in software is about dependencies, and monorepos are playing double or nothing with dependencies.
The issue with Monorepos is that they can amplify bad decisions and tech debt. Any bad decisions are magnified across the organization. But they definitely don't make it easier or harder to make that initial bad decision.
The upside is that dependencies are just there and not hidden behind interfaces.
The downside is that a bad dependency cannot be abstracted behind a micro-service interface. Once it's out in the wild it can do crazy things.
>How does a monorepo make any of these things harder? Make a new folder, slap a version on it, push your versioned artifacts.
not liking microservices myself but - if I did this wouldn't it mean that the code in version 19 was now removed from the code in version 18 and back in git history making it more difficult to figure out just where things went wrong on a difficult little edge case.
I don't see where microservices or not have much to do with having a monorepo or not. We have a monorepo and we have both. We have "microservices" and we don't. It's also a huge variable term. What I call microservices you guys might call "a bunch of monoliths communicating with each other". Same difference.
git bisect helps to easily identify hard to find but reproducible bugs. Since we try to have small PRs once you found the breaking commit it is usually easy enough to the find the bug. Murphy and exceptions obviously apply.
You trade simplicity of having everything in one place vs. ability to independently version pieces at the cost of more complex tooling and build systems required to test.
Usually there's some sweet spot, but the answer isn't obvious and one isn't clearly better.
We do not version our services in that sense. It's a monorepo after all.
We do have microservices.
We use kubernetes.
Deployment is a breeze. Only services with changes are actually deployed.
We do hourly deploys to production.
None of the issues you describe apply here and the monorepo works awesomely for us. This is a SaaS situation where all services making up that SaaS solution and that we host are in that monorepo.
YMMV if you are in a different situation such as having to ship versioned software for customers to self host/install for example. Our accompanying software that is usable in conjunction with the SaaS solution is not part of that Monorepo and each of those are versioned and deployed to various external marketplaces.
That's a different story and a monorepo has zero effect on that. The versioning that was mentioned before was versioning of the services themselves, i.e. this build produces version 1.5.4, next build is 1.5.5 etc. We don't do that any longer since moving to a monorepo. We deploy by commit hash basically.
That is way different from providing v1 of your API and changes come out in v2 of the API while you also still provide v1 of the same API. You can (and we do) do that perfectly well with or without a monorepo. Mostly for the public API. Internal API's often don't need to do versioning and one can go with backwards compatible changes and/or rolling a change out over multiple commit deploy cycles.
Some of this will depend on your size I suppose. The larger the org, the more services etc. the more stable versioning I would suppose happening.
I do agree to some degree with that (I'm the OP not the siblings :)). We just have to define what small means. Netflix or Google are way up there in scale. In relation to them we are small. We also don't actually have microservices vs. what I'm reading about Netflix's architecture. We probably have "macroservices" in comparison with them but we definitely aren't one monolith. We got a bunch of "small monoliths" so to speak.
That said, we're not small either. In our niche, which you might recognize if I said more, we're the top solution customers choose (but I won't go into much more detail than that for obvious reasons).
I actually couldn’t agree more. Figuring out what “small” means really is the key and that thoughtful level of analysis is what’s really important for determining what the right architecture is for a business. I must’ve articulated my thoughts poorly earlier, while I’m not crazy about monoliths, I’m not opposed to them either. It’s the monorepos that contain many monoliths that concern me. Microservices in general are hard to execute on, and even the most successful companies that have realized microservices have monoliths running somewhere in the background. Your enterprise sounds interesting and they’re fortunate to have such a self reflective engineer on their team.
