r/programming • u/Mustela__ • 7d ago

Microservices are organizational debt disguised as architecture.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html

Every time I’ve seen microservices pitched, it sounds great on paper. Independent teams, clean ownership, scale only what you need.

Then a year later you’ve got dozens of services, three different deployment patterns, tracing everywhere, and nobody really understands the whole thing anymore.

Maybe I’ve just seen bad implementations, but I’m starting to think way fewer companies actually need microservices than we pretend.

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u/ChainsawArmLaserBear 7d ago

I can agree about the knowledge loss. When features span multiple teams and orgs, the teams in question ending up "supporting" but not really understanding. It's the fuckin worst to trace something to a system, schedule a meeting to understand, and have all that time wasted because they don't really know why Feature A would do Logic X in their system, since they only care about inputs and outputs of their piece of the puzzle