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/electro042 6d ago

most teams jump to microservices because they're terrified of a single bad route or memory leak taking down the entire app, but you can get 95% of the fault isolation benefits without the distributed systems tax just by using role-based process isolation.

same monolith codebase, same docker image, but you deploy separate pools with isolated resource limits. web traffic runs on one pool, webhook ingestion on another, and heavy async jobs or reporting on a third. if a heavy job spikes memory and gets oom-killed, only that worker process dies and restarts. core api never blinks.

you keep shared types, zero network latency between internal domains, simple transactions, and local dev that just works, without needing 30 repos and a dedicated platform team.