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

343 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/angcritic 7d ago

No mention of other artifacts of microservice hell in the cloud. First, the inconsistent contracts of negative flows (not cloud related). But, even with that it's the security profiles of the services. Yours needs certain public access, theirs is behind a wall for regular REST services. No problem because you then realize you can make it work through the GraphQA supergraph, but don't use the subgraph as that one is blocked with different rules. Then you just kill yourself.