Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

Within each service, you may be OK with the team who owns that zone picking a different technology stack or data store. Other concerns may kick in here, of course. Your inclination to let teams pick the right tool for the job may be tempered by the fact that it becomes harder to hire people or move them between teams if you have 10 different technology stacks to support. Similarly, if each team picks a completely different data store, you may find yourself lacking enough experience to run any of them at scale. Netflix, for example, has mostly standardized on Cassandra as a data-store technology. Although it may not be the best fit for all of its cases, Netflix feels that the value gained by building tooling and expertise around Cassandra is more important than having to support and operate at scale multiple other platforms that may be a better fit for certain tasks. Netflix is an extreme example, where scale is likely the strongest overriding factor, but you get the idea.

Choosing stack of technologies