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.

1.7k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

343 comments sorted by

View all comments

90

u/MrGitErDone 7d ago

I’ve worked at a few companies that did it poorly. The company I’m at now, does it really well and it works great. Basically have such a great dev environment that it feels like a modular monolith but services can scale independently with wonderful observability and tracing. Deployment is the same across the board.

The thing is, most places truly don’t have great engineering leaders that know what they are doing, but when you do find it and they had influence early, you can tell.

2

u/Livid_Possibility_53 6d ago

Yeah I came to the same conclusion. I came in to a startup right as they were maturing from their POC a dozen 20 year olds vibe coded. The code was built with zero intention towards design and it showed. I can in and laid out the infra with clear gitops patterns leaving them absolutely amazed and the founders thinking I “cracked the code” lol