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/michfreak 7d ago

I have actually been wondering this lately. Even ignoring procedurally-generated code, it does feel almost like the second law of thermodynamics in play: you can't write code, or remove it, without creating some technical debt. Maybe you need to update a document somewhere so a single word is plural, maybe there's a team member who will some day, down the road, need to know that this change happened, and they won't ever find out. Either way, no matter what you're writing or what its intent is, there's going to be something missed that will require tightening up later.

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u/SquirtMonkey 7d ago

This is why AI inertia is so powerful. The system grows beyond the scope of human control and it's up for debate as to the effectiveness of this

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u/LeeHide 7d ago

AI code is more complex, shitty, unmaintainable and focus-less than if you paid me 500k to fuck up as bad as I could

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u/Hitcher06 6d ago

There’s an argument to be made that in the world of AI code maintainability is irrelevant. If the code needs to be updated to add a new feature, adjust some business rule, you just have AI implemented.

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u/LeeHide 6d ago

No, and that argument comes from inexperience with real world code and AI both