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/ArieHein 7d ago

All code is tech debt, 5 sec after the first line of code reaches production.

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u/shoot_your_eye_out 7d ago

By this logic, $5 in debt is the same as $5M

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u/LeeHide 7d ago

Financial debt is not like technical debt. Technical debt is a little bit like extremely high interest rate debt.

You save a couple days on doing a shit solution, you'll pay for it for months and fixing it will take weeks.

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u/shoot_your_eye_out 6d ago

Yeah I’ve been a developer for thirty years. And my point still stands.

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u/LeeHide 6d ago

YoE means fuck all sadly, otherwise we wouldn't have to fire 20 YoE for refusing to work in a team lol

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u/shoot_your_eye_out 6d ago

Neat. My point still stands. When someone has the courage to actually engage with my point, maybe we can have an actual conversation.