You are of course entitled to your opinion, and I do appreciate going against the grain, but having worked
in an “hours” environment and a “minutes” environment I couldn’t disagree more. The minutes job is so much more pleasant to work with in nearly every way. And ironically ended up being higher quality because you couldn’t lean on a giant integration test suite as a crutch. Automated business metric based canary rollbacks, sophisticated feature flagging and gating systems, contract tests, etc. and these run in production, so are accurate where integration tests often aren’t in a complicated service topology.
There are also categories of work that are so miserable with long deployment times that they just don’t get done at all in those environments. Things like improving telemetry, tracing, observability. Things like performance debugging, where lower envs aren’t representative.
I would personally never go back, for a system of moderate or more distributive complexity (ie > 10 services, 10 total data stores )
All very fair points! I think it is perhaps much more situational than I made it out to be, and that functioning in an “hours” environment is only possible as described if some organizational patterns are in place to make it work.
yeah i realized as i wrote that out that my personal conclusions probably don't apply in a monoservice type architecture. If you have a mono(or few) service architecture with a single (or few) db, it is actually feasible to have integration tests that are worth the runtime. The bigger & more distributed you get, the more the costs of integration tests go up (velocity, fragility, maintenance, burden of mirroring production config) and the equation doesnt pencil out anymore. Probably other scenarios where im wrong also.
There are also categories of work that are so miserable with long deployment times that they just don’t get done at all in those environments. Things like improving telemetry, tracing, observability. Things like performance debugging, where lower envs aren’t representative.
I would personally never go back, for a system of moderate or more distributive complexity (ie > 10 services, 10 total data stores )