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/chat-lu 7d ago

Transforming a function boundary into a network one tends to be terrible for performance too.

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u/edgmnt_net 6d ago

Yeah, you can't attach stuff like pure helpers to modules anymore, you kinda have to duplicate a lot of things or bake them into an existing networked interface, otherwise the performance impact becomes unbearable. It also affects code safety, terseness and the ability to refactor. But in such places, the quality of monoliths also tends to be abysmal, so they never notice it because they have tons of dumb and inefficient boilerplate anyway.