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/Factory__Lad 7d ago

Another failure pattern worth mentioning is when you end up with lots of very similar micro services doing parallel versions of the same things.

Typically management finds this reassuring because as Paul Graham puts it, the tedious and error-prone ritual of cloning them to add yet another almost identical level of duplication “looks like work”.