I assume Hacker News has a bot that automatically posts this skit for every microservice article, but it case it doesn't <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ</a>. We should all know Galactus' pain.
I've been through similar transformation (just 250 microservices) and I'm not sure the end result was actually better. Microservices are ok if things go well and you can maintain a large army of developers - which you didn't really need in the first place.<p>In my case: Fast forward 5 years and the business growth didn't materialize; the board made working in the content unpleasant enough so that all the good and expensive developers left and outsourced the rest to India.
These poor contractors have to deal with 20 microservices per team (while we were juggling 5-10, already to much, I think 1-2 services per team).<p>The old monolith were fine. Microservices - and transitions to new languages - create a lot of new problems (performance of joins over network, rabbitmq dead letters handling, services ddosing each others, updating a shared library and having to bump it in every service in the entire company)<p>I feel like it was basically spinning wheels.
I missed the part where the person describes that they have a very large development team which justified a non-monolithic architecture. True microservices (with independent development and inter-service contracts) are a reflection of the makeup and scale of the development team. Using true microservices for performance reasons is a misnomer these days: A modular monolith (one codebase that can be deployed into multiple independently scalable services) makes much more sense when the dev team is not big enough to justify the added overhead, but some aspects of the application require independent horizontal scaling.
Having 1000+ services seems like an overkill for an ecommerce company. I certainly hope they aren't doing something silly like a service for each payment type or a service to manage inventory and another service to manage orders.
As a side note, the management of this company a while go announced they would cancel WFH. A standard story - they built a huge office nobody wanted to use. So whoever could, tried to find a new job. The rest have to go to the office 3 days a week by default. Which is plain stupid because they could get much more talent if they weren't that inflexible.