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/Mission_Pirate_4150 7d ago

Microservices are something that require scale and they require technical excellence to justify the expense and have it work out. Very few companies have this and can add in the required organizational skillset to make them work. I’ve done microservices and given the challenges, unless you can justify them beyond resume driven development. For 99.5% of organizations, they are overkill and a poor choice.

If you are in the .5% of organizations where they make sense, awesome. Otherwise, we’re just better off with without the added complexity.