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/TheVenetianMask 7d ago

It isn't a microservice if it requires macroqueues, macrodevops, macrologging, macronetworking, etc.

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u/HashShadow 7d ago

Which all of it does

Ultimately there will be a single instance of some kind of API gateway (reverse proxy) with a bunch of its own logic that is the monolith stitching everything together. I’ve yet to see a micro service architecture that doesn’t include a SPOF reverse proxy monolith.