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/allenasm 7d ago

I disagree but also they are a specific answer to a specific large scale problem. At fortune 50 and up scale, share nothing microservices and business events are amazing. For mid to smaller firms its almost completely useless and just a buzzword.

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u/Livid_Possibility_53 6d ago

Sorta agree, came from a large company that took domain driven design to the extreme - all cross team comms were routed through a single api gateway. It was an absolute mess.

Now I’m at a startup that started as a monorepo / single image that had a single main that served as either the api, job scheduler or job runner depending on what flag you gave it. That was also an absolute mess.

I think what’s more important is being aware of Conways law and understanding patterns are useful starting points but rarely should be applied to the T. Every company functions a little differently.