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In the previous post, we started with the observation that companies (still) want to break up their monoliths into microservices. If you ask them what they expect from this measure, they typically expect to cure the “big ball of mud” issue with microservices or to improve their time to market with them.

Time and again clients approach my colleagues and me with the request that they want to break up their monolith into microservices and they ask us how to do this best. Apparently, they are convinced that breaking up the monolith into microservices will solve some big problems they had for a long time.

Recently, I had two experiences within a few days that made me think regarding system dependability. In both situations, the systems acted detached from their surrounding reality and thus became confusing or even annoying – even if it would have been easy for them to detect their reality detachment.

About a decade ago, Jeffrey Dean and Luiz André Barroso published their IMO great article “The tail at scale” in the Communications of the ACM ¹. The article dives into the topic of latency tail-tolerance.

In the previous post, we identified time as our most precious resource. We saw that we are always confronted with a lot of tasks and expectations of other people. We also discussed that quite some of them turn out not to have any value for us or other people we care about. I call such tasks time killers.