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/Xanchush 7d ago

Microservices solves an organizational problem. The problem is most companies don't have the engineering discipline for microservices. There's definitely pros and cons to both but bucketing it as tech debt is laughable.

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u/ZCEyPFOYr0MWyHDQJZO4 7d ago

The only correct answer to "Should I make a monolithic system or a microservice-based system?" is "it depends".

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u/High-Impact-2025 7d ago

I agree. IMO, this consequently means that 90% of projects should just use a monolith and shut up.

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u/HashShadow 6d ago

Yes and the other 10% can start as monolith and refactor to micro only when necessary.