Unlocking the Power of Nano Services: A New Era in Microservices Architecture
medium.com
Nano-services are a new trend in software architecture that has gained popularity in recent years. It is a microservices-like architecture…

I didn’t see this coming and I think it’s funny, so I decided to post it here.

  • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    16 days ago

    I feel like this name addresses the problem of services claiming to be microservices when they’re not.

    Does that even happen? cat is micro, sed is micro, systemd isn’t and doesn’t claim to be

  • tyler@programming.dev
    0·
    16 days ago

    we’ve been using nano-services for the past 6 months or so. Two different reasons. A codebase we absorbed when a different team was dissolved had a bunch of them, all part of AWS AppSync functions. I hate it. It’s incredibly hard to parse and understand what is going on because every single thing is a single function and they all call each other in different ways. Very confusing.

    But the second way we implemented ourselves and it’s going very well. We started using AWS Step Functions and it allows building very decoupled systems by piecing together much larger pieces. It’s honestly a joy to use and incredibly easy to debug. Hardest part is testing, but once it’s working it seems very stable. But sometimes you need to do something to transform data to piece together these larger systems. That’s where ‘nano-services’ come in. Essentially they’re just small ruby, python, js lambdas that are stuck into the middle of a step function flow in order to do more complex data transformation to pass it to the next node in the flow. When I say small I mean one of the functions we have is just this

    def handler(event:, context:)
  if event['errorType']
    clazz = Object.const_set event['errorType'], Class.new(StandardError)
    raise clazz.new.exception, event['errorMessage']
  end
  event
end

    to map a service that doesn’t fail with a 4xx http code to one that does fail with a 4xx http code.

    You could argue this is a complete waste of resources, but it allows us to keep using that other service without any modifications. All the other services that depend on that service that maps its own error types can keep working the way they want. And if we ever do update that service and all its dependencies, now ‘fixing’ the workflow is literally as simple as just deleting the node and the ‘nano-service’ to go along with it.

    I should note that the article is about the first thing I discussed, the terrible codebase. Please don’t use nano-services like that, it’s literally one of the worst codebases I’ve ever touched and no joke, it’s less than 2 years old.

      • tyler@programming.dev
        0·
        16 days ago

        You can write your glue nano-service in c/c++ if you want, it’s just that: glue. It doesn’t matter as long as you don’t need to change the original services which also can be written in whatever you want. Ruby, Python, JS just work out of the box with aws lambda and you don’t really have to maintain them or any sort of build infra so it allows for very little maintenance or upkeep cost. You don’t really test these glue lambdas either.

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
          0·
          16 days ago

          Things won’t be simpler just because you cut everything up in tiny tiny pieces (I mean it will be easier because it solves some surface level problem right now, pushing the real problem down the road), it creates a complexity of its own.

            • Valmond@lemmy.world
              0·
              15 days ago

              It’s easy to say I didn’t read your message, which I obviously did (why write lies like that?), just because you don’t understand my point.

              • tyler@programming.dev
                0·
                10 days ago

                Because I clearly said that you don’t cut up things into tiny pieces. It was both in the first paragraph in my post and the last one. I said you use tiny functions to glue together larger systems. So yeah you clearly didn’t read what I wrote.

                • Valmond@lemmy.world
                  0·
                  10 days ago

                  Micro services is already cutting stuff up in small pieces lol.

                  The opposite us monolithic software.

      • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        I’m a C/C++ developer though.

        Ya feel good about yourself, slugger? /s

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
          0·
          16 days ago

          Yeah, I kind of am. Just found a 33% time job so that I can gradually leave software engineering 😁

  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Announcing FemtoServices™ - One Packet at a Time!

    In an era of bloated bandwidth and endless data streams, today we proudly unveil a groundbreaking approach to networking: FemtoServices™ – Connectivity, one Ethernet packet at a time!

    • zlatko@programming.dev
      0·
      15 days ago

      (Not to be confused with our premium product, ParticleServices, which just shoot neutrinos around one by one.)

  • sirdorius@programming.dev
    0·
    16 days ago

    I was going to write that every function should be a service as sarcasm, then I realized that’s exactly what this article is proposing. Now I’m not even sure how to make a more ridiculous proposal than this.

      • Nougat@fedia.io
        0·
        16 days ago

        I am now offering Planck services for sale, at US$0.0001 per bit.

        For an extra fee, you can even choose the value of the bit.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    16 days ago

    Nano services are microservices after your company realizes monoliths are much easier to maintain and relabels their monoliths as microservices.

    Unironically. I’d put a significant wager down on that being the source of this term.