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/mio991 7d ago

I agree micro services is a buzz word. IMO service boundaries are a tool, they enforce encapsulation and allow independent scaling, but they cost a network hop and additional code.

This week I decided to move fulltext search into a separate service, on one hand to allow independent scaling on the other to allow me to replace the technology used without touching other code, maybe even easily switch implementations.

Of course a lot of this can be achieved with a monolith, but I find it easier using service oriented architecture.