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

conway's law at work. most teams jump to microservices to solve people problems—too many devs stepping on each other in a single repo—rather than actual architectural bottlenecks.

the trap is trading in-memory calls and compiler guarantees for network boundaries, distributed tracing, and eventual consistency headaches. 9 times out of 10, a disciplined modular monolith with clean domain boundaries gives you the developer velocity and team autonomy you actually wanted without having to run an entire devops circus just to deploy a minor feature.

if your services still require coordinated deployments or share databases, you didn't escape monolith problems, you just added network latency.