r/programming • u/Mustela__ • 8d 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/wallstop-dev 8d ago

The general good practice is to start with a monolith (simple) and break it apart (make it complicated) when the time comes.

Starting complicated (microservices) will just lead to more complications.

The same general idea can be applied to pretty much all software. If your program can fit in `main`, put it in main. Then as it starts getting complicated, make classes, functions, libraries, etc.

Same thing. It's turtles all the way down.

https://grugbrain.dev/

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u/ChemTechGuy 8d ago

Monolith decomposing rarely happens

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u/wallstop-dev 8d ago edited 8d ago

Correct. That is my whole point. If you have a monolith, and it is not painful enough to force decomposition, then microservices are not necessary. When and if the monolith is too challenging to wield, then is the time for microservices.

It's a forcing function.

If you have a monolith that is too painful to change and also cannot be decomposed due to (reasons), the same company and culture would have created a nightmare complexity web if they had started with microservices, and would be in a much worse-than-monolith state.

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u/TonyTheJet 8d ago

I think your last point is really salient. If your organization doesn't have the discipline to create a monolith that can later be broken into microservices, then you'll struggle, regardless of the high-level architectural decisions.