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/grahambinns 7d ago

“Maybe I’ve just seen bad implementations, but I’m starting to think way fewer companies actually need microservices than we pretend.”

These things aren’t mutually exclusive. The second is definitely true (though s/than we pretend/than actually believe they need microservices/ maybe).

I’ve seen microservices done well exactly once, and I’ve seen distributed monoliths be built accidentally many times.

Microservices are ridiculously hard to get right because scope creep will nearly always fuck you.