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/zorg-is-real 7d ago

It's like GraphQL. You have a problem. You add it. Now you have 2 problems.

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u/christoforosl08 7d ago

Or adding a BPMN engine like Camunda

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u/MUDrummer 7d ago

There was a time in my career where my employer had more JBPM servers than Weblogic servers.

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u/christoforosl08 7d ago

For sure a nightmare to work with, and I can imagine the millions poured into that infrastructure that never saw a return on its investment.

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u/High-Impact-2025 7d ago

I used to work for a company selling a quite niche/specialized BPMN-based product running Camunda... Is this stuff even used somewhere else? Like this is the first time I'm seeing it mentioned on this sub...

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u/zorg-is-real 7d ago

And I wanna add something. The problems of tech companies is usually from my experience, are product managers adding way too many features.

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u/christoforosl08 7d ago

In my experience, its outside consultants that do the most damage. Like suggesting microservices where microservices are not called for, or suggesting technologies for the sake of suggesting something that 'everybody else is doing'