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dev.to staff
dev.to staff

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Moving from a Java Monolith to Microservices at Squarespace

Julian Applebaum stopped by to discuss the challenges of moving Squarespace's Java monolith to a service-oriented architecture. Julian describes drawing boundaries between different layers of business logic and discovering fundamental tensions in restructuring application logic throughout the migration. Squarespace's journey to a series of RESTful API endpoints was a matter of building services and integrating them slowly as they became reliable. This move was inevitable for Squarespace's team of about 100 engineers.

Top comments (25)

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

Love the web app analogy at 4:30, about changing the wheels of a truck as it moves. Also, I've noticed I have a tendency of wanting to make a feature perfect being rolling it out. As a very junior dev, it's refreshing to hear how y'all are making the move.

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cdvillard profile image
Charles D. Villard

This was actually a great way to approach this sort of breakdown.

On a content development note, I think it'd be cool to throw in little callouts to define acronyms or topics that might not be known to everyone, like when Julian mentions RPC at 3:05.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Good call!

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jeffochoa profile image
Jeff

Love this type of content, videos and podcasts. Especially talks from other developpers, it's amazing what you can learn from other people experiences and perspectives, like I few days ago I heard this Laravel PHP podcasts and that inspired me to start working in a new small project. Well done guys, I hope to see more of this in the next days.

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annarankin profile image
Anna Rankin

Great point at 6:20 - much easier to maintain velocity when you're working on smaller pieces rather than within a monolith. This is great! Splitting up the traffic between the current and new code is a smart approach.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I liked at 3:43 when Julian talked about the step-by-step process of moving the whole thing over once the design was settled on. Very much a balancing act with a living, breathing application for sure.

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alexkolson profile image
Alex Olson

I'm getting the same Media error as many others:

Error loading media: File could not be played.

I'm on chrome. Looking at the error console It's trying to load what looks like the movie file and then getting a 403.

Would love to be able to watch this!

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vikkio88 profile image
Vincenzo

lol that sneaky github mascotte, creeping from the behind the plant pot

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ewantoo profile image
Ewan

Obviously got more traffic than you were expecting,

"The owner of the file has exceeded their traffic limit."

as the response to content.jwplatform.com/videos/TRw3...

The price of success! :)

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jvanbruegge profile image
Jan van Brügge

Payment data in MongoDB, a database which does not garantuee that your data gets actually written. Nice

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martyonthefly profile image
Sylvain Marty

Hi! Do you have sources about this fact ?

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jvanbruegge profile image
Jan van Brügge • Edited

This article sums it up pretty well. Most developers dont know that the default is insecure.
Only fsynced is the option that garatuees writes. But then MongoDB does not have performance benefits. There are other NoSQL DBs that are better and For Payment data I would always use a RDBMS.

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martyonthefly profile image
Sylvain Marty

Wow this article is very interesting ! Glad to know that now :)
Thanks a lot for your sharing

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oysteino profile image
Øystein Øvrebø

"The owner of the file has exceeded their traffic limit."