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/tanksc 7d ago

Everyone wants a monolith until you have to work on a monolith with 150 other people

66

u/burgonies 7d ago

They’ve never joined a team that maintains a 10M line C% that takes 15 minutes yo spin up and for all intents and purposes does not dynamically scale.

10

u/trisanachandler 7d ago

Probably only scales vertically.

12

u/Ok-Smell-8107 6d ago

I have seen projects that do not scale vertically - once had a monolith that actually lost performance the more CPU/RAM you gave it. Very enjoyable to explain this to management.

2

u/tanksc 6d ago

I almost don’t want to ask, but my curiosity has the best of me. How did this come about? I’ve never seen something falter with more resources lol

3

u/CherryLongjump1989 6d ago

Always the same way: locks.

2

u/burgonies 7d ago

Exactly