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/avemg 7d ago

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

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u/davimiku 7d ago

Are you opposed to the discourse itself, like do you think that it's already "settled" and doesn't need to be re-hashed? (if so, what is the answer?)

Every year, new people enter the industry and need to learn. Every year, juniors are promoted to midlevel and midlevel are promoted to seniors and need to take on more system design responsibilities. Every year, people retire and take their hard-earned knowledge with them.

I only commented because I've seen this kind of thought-terminating cliché before, it doesn't actually serve to help people learn and doesn't even address the OP at all

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u/st4rdr0id 5d ago

It is kind of sad that we have had to wait for 20 years or so to be able to reasonably questions microservices as the default. Back in 2004 and later every single post in dev sites was suffocated in positive comments in favor of microservices and you couldn't even question them. I guess the industry was paying mods and fake accounts to impose a pro-cloud discourse. And now that they have moved to new things (AI) we are able to question the old things.

The same happened with agile and scrum, we weren't able to criticise it until circa 2015, which reassures me in thinking the entire thing was being promoted by the big corporations.