Software service granularity: Getting it right

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's widely accepted that, in most cases at least, software systems should be modular, consisting of separate, discrete services. But what about the size of those services? How big or small should they be? This is where the question of service granularity comes in: too small and your system will become needlessly complicated; too big and you lose all the benefits of modularity you were seeking in the first place.

In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Neal Ford and Mark Richards — authors of multiple books on software architecture — to discuss service granularity. They explain why it matters and how software architects can go about getting it right, through the lens of granularity integrators and disintegrators.

Learn more about Neal and Mark's 2021 book Software Architecture: The Hard Parts (co-authored with Zhamak Dehghaniand Pramod Sadalage): https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/software-architecture-hard-parts

Find out more about Neal and Mark's second edition of The Fundamentals of Software Architecture, set to be released in early 2025: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781098175504/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.
0:11.9	My name is Kenrageridge.
0:13.1	I'm one of your regular hosts.
0:14.8	I'm joined today by host slash guest Neil Ford.
0:18.7	Hello, everyone.
0:19.9	Welcome back to the podcast, and I'm over here in the luxurious guest side of the studio today.
0:26.4	We also have a co-author of several books and a longtime companion to Neil's Mark Richards.
0:32.1	Hey, everyone, and hello, Ken, and hey again, Neil.
0:37.2	He says that because we have like six Zoom calls a week, so we're writing books together.
0:42.7	Very true.
0:44.0	Yeah, writing is quite the collaborative effort.
0:46.7	People think it's alone on a beach somewhere, and nothing can be further from the truth.
0:50.8	So today we're going to talk about the right granularity, excuse me, for software
0:55.4	services, you know, the old, how big should my house be? So I guess just opening thoughts
1:00.4	from each of you, if you don't mind. Well, I'll tell you one good way to open this is a quote
1:05.8	that I made a long time ago that seems to have proliferated everywhere.
1:11.4	And that quote is, embrace modularity, but beware of granularity.
1:18.6	And somehow that quote just kind of took off.
1:22.5	So what's the difference?
1:24.1	Those kind of sound like the same thing to me.
1:26.5	You know what?
1:27.1	Ken, a lot of times architects, well, and developers do interchange these two terms, but they are very, very much different.
	...

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