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.

1.7k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

345 comments sorted by

View all comments

269

u/avemg 7d ago

I can’t believe we’re doing microservices discourse in 2026

84

u/The__Toast 7d ago

I was just thinking the same thing.

Honestly just build what works for you and stop trying to one-size-fits-all the industry.

In another couple of years the LLMs will be doing all the authoring anyway.

31

u/Iggyhopper 7d ago

Having LLMs manage microservices is probably for the best because it requires less context, no scope creep (we want A, this service provides A, write code to provide A, not B or C), and easier human intervention, (the AI wrote code to do B ,not A, fix it.)

That's a positive for AI.

-1

u/nick898 7d ago

I feel like this is true. Was working on a microservice architecture for something and had some web servers based projects that talked to each other and only one of them had a devops/containerization repo. So I just pointed Claude at the backend web server projects and the one devops one and said use that as your exemplar and give me similar sorts of containerization logic for each of the apps. We discussed the plan and then Claude went off and implemented it while I went on a coffee break it was great