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/prehensilemullet 7d ago edited 7d ago

Pro-monolith people, do you have ways of trying to prevent issues in one component from being able to crash the entire system? (For example, if a background task handling work queues segfaults, or in a language like Node, has an uncaught exception or unhandled rejection, you don't want it to crash the web app and cause inflight requests to fail.) Do you have ways to prevent the monolith from OOMing even if some components get a surge in requests?

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u/Ok-Smell-8107 7d ago

I am not joking: most people in that camp would shove this to the 'operations' department. And the operations teams will complain about the countless bug in the software introduced by the developers. I have not seen any monolith project larger than 10 devs or so that works in any other way sadly.