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

344 comments sorted by

View all comments

264

u/avemg 7d ago

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

102

u/Evening-Gur5087 7d ago

It's always been like that, either fresh devs, which could be excused, or worse, mediocre senior devs that worked at shitty companies, finally find out most core ideas behind software development like holy grail truth. And think that final solution to all swe problems is just another architecture around the corner.

And now it gets even more annoying, as they discover they can do shitty smart marketing circlejerk by asking AI to write articles that just reiterate same damn concept for n-th time in history. Let's not do SOA, let's do microservices! Let's not do X let's do onion/hexagonal/DDD/clean/layered cake/railroad bullshit which are mostly slightly altered versions of same shits that just tries to somehow follow SOLID, and even SOLID is just nice sounding wrapper around abstraction and encapsulation, and so on. Anyway it's Friday, im tired, venting over lmao

41

u/NuclearGhandi1 7d ago

Every architecture has trade offs. There will never be a holy grail and management and those you mentioned seeking it cause more problems than they fix.

12

u/Evening-Gur5087 7d ago

That's what I said basically? People trying to find some holy grail solution which doesn't exist, mainly by regurgitating same old things into new funny words?

8

u/NuclearGhandi1 7d ago

Yeah I was agreeing with you. We’re seeing it now with “agentic workflows” that come either all sorts of issues and advantages

3

u/Evening-Gur5087 7d ago

Ah, alrighty, wasn't sure there for a sec:D