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The Reality of Microservices

October 2025

Microservices are not a silver bullet. They introduce complexity and operational overhead. Here's what I learned building them in production.

The Promise vs. Reality

Microservices promise independent scaling, technology diversity, and faster deployment cycles. In reality, they often bring distributed system complexity, debugging nightmares, and substantial infrastructure costs.

When to Consider Microservices

A microservices architecture might be right for your project if:

• Your team is large enough to manage multiple independent services.
• Parts of your system have drastically different scaling needs.
• You need to deploy specific components without affecting the entire system.
• You have complex business logic that can be clearly partitioned into domains.

The Engineering Tax

Moving to microservices is not free. You pay an "engineering tax" in the form of:

• Distributed Complexity: Handling network lag, partial failures, and data consistency.
• Observability: You need distributed tracing, centralized logging, and advanced monitoring.
• DevOps Overload: Managing CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, and service discovery.

My Recommendation

Always start with a modular monolith. It’s easier to split a well-structured monolith into microservices later than it is to merge poorly designed services into one. Only move to microservices when your monolith is truly holding you back.

Conclusion

Microservices are a tool, not a goal. Focus on solving business problems with the simplest architecture possible. Often, that isn't microservices.