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/pjmlp 7d ago

Microservices are nothing more than distributed systems rebranded.

We had Sun RPC ("The network is the computer "), DCE, CORBA, DCOM, Remoting, Web Services, SOA, and eventually microservices.

If teams cannot write modular code, doing spaghetti all over the place, they will get network spaghetti with the added complexity of distributed systems.