Introduction
Microservices are often sold as a scalability solution.
In reality, they’re an organizational scaling tool—and an expensive one.
Most teams don’t need them. Many teams are actively harmed by them.
Microservices Don’t Reduce Complexity — They Move It
What you gain:
- Independent deployments
- Team autonomy
What you lose:
- Simplicity
- Debuggability
- Local reasoning
Complexity doesn’t disappear. It just becomes distributed.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions
- Network failures
- Distributed tracing
- Versioning contracts
- Data consistency
- Deployment coordination
Every service boundary is a tax.
Monoliths Aren’t the Enemy
A well-structured monolith:
- Is easier to test
- Is easier to refactor
- Is easier to reason about
Most “monolith problems” are actually codebase discipline problems.
When Microservices Actually Make Sense
You might need microservices if:
- Teams deploy independently
- Domains are truly isolated
- Organizational scaling is your bottleneck
Not because:
- “Netflix uses them”
- “We might scale someday”
The Modular Monolith Sweet Spot
Before microservices, aim for:
- Clear domain boundaries
- Explicit interfaces
- Internal modules
This gives you:
- 80% of the benefit
- 20% of the cost
Final Take
Microservices are not a maturity badge.
They’re a tradeoff.
If you haven’t hit the limits of a monolith, you’re optimizing for problems you don’t have.