Stop treating microservices like a trophy. They are a tax.
We’ve been told they "decouple" teams and solve scaling. In reality, most companies are just trading code complexity for operational nightmares.
In a monolith, your enemy is messy code. You fix that with a refactor.
In microservices, your enemy is the network. The network is slow, unreliable, and breaks in ways you cannot easily test.
If Service A fails because Service B is down, they aren't decoupled. They are just far apart—tied together by a wire and a lot of latency.
We’ve replaced 5-line ACID transactions with the *Saga Pattern*, manual state machines, and "Eventual Consistency" (which is usually just a fancy way of saying the data is wrong and we hope it fixes itself).
Why do we do it?
* Resume-Driven Development: Building complex systems to look "expensive."
* Cargo Culting: Copying Netflix's architecture when we have 10 engineers, not 10,000.
* Sunk Cost Fallacy: We spent 6 months on the YAML files, so we have to use them.
*The hard truth:* If you cannot write clean code in one repository, you cannot write it in twenty. If your monolith is a "Big Ball of Mud," microservices will just be a *Distributed Big Ball of Mud.*
I’ve written a breakdown of why we need to stop the over-engineering and how to actually audit your architecture.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 10.1 ms ] threadWe’ve been told they "decouple" teams and solve scaling. In reality, most companies are just trading code complexity for operational nightmares.
In a monolith, your enemy is messy code. You fix that with a refactor. In microservices, your enemy is the network. The network is slow, unreliable, and breaks in ways you cannot easily test.
If Service A fails because Service B is down, they aren't decoupled. They are just far apart—tied together by a wire and a lot of latency.
We’ve replaced 5-line ACID transactions with the *Saga Pattern*, manual state machines, and "Eventual Consistency" (which is usually just a fancy way of saying the data is wrong and we hope it fixes itself).
Why do we do it?
* Resume-Driven Development: Building complex systems to look "expensive." * Cargo Culting: Copying Netflix's architecture when we have 10 engineers, not 10,000. * Sunk Cost Fallacy: We spent 6 months on the YAML files, so we have to use them.
*The hard truth:* If you cannot write clean code in one repository, you cannot write it in twenty. If your monolith is a "Big Ball of Mud," microservices will just be a *Distributed Big Ball of Mud.*
I’ve written a breakdown of why we need to stop the over-engineering and how to actually audit your architecture.