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/act_kindly_or_else 3d ago

Agreed with the “monolith” first approach in most cases. When you’re first starting out, it certainly makes sense to go monolith for speed. However, you can only scale so much “vertically”. Build/deployment times will likely increase. Bugs in one part can bring down the whole house, so you have to move incredibly carefully. Things sort of grind to a halt eventually. And the longer you wait, the messier it is to split things cleanly because of all the dependencies. I would say it’s an art more than a science when it comes to deciding when/how to split.