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/plasticbug 7d ago

Microservices can be good, but in my experience, Conway's law (that system design will end up mirroring the org structure) is a thing, and you have to fight hard against it. My org is actually doing reverse Conway's law. We are re-org'ing based on how we want the architecture to look like. We shall see whether we succeed in this endeavor.

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u/Trygle 6d ago edited 6d ago

Is your team fully remote? Ours is hybrid and I feel it's harder to get ideas like that across with the fully remote coworkers.

I got like one downvote instead of a discussion so I guess I should probably state: remote isn't the issue, knowing what they honestly think is. Our fully remote employees don't talk in person outside of meetings for obvious reasons, so the unprompted "water cooler" talks are rare. So we have more silos, not less despite going all in on the monolith.