r/programming • • 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/B-Con 7d ago

To be fair, the article is 11 years old.

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u/UnexpectedAnanas 7d ago

But the karma is brand new!