Not Everything Needs to Be Microservices (Seriously, Stop It)

Ah, microservices—the holy grail of modern software architecture. The silver bullet that will solve all our problems, make our code infinitely scalable, and probably fix climate change while it’s at it. Except… that’s not quite how it works, is it?

Somewhere along the way, developers decided that every single application needed to be sliced into a hundred tiny, independently deployable services, each with its own database, messaging queue, and a dev team suffering from existential dread. And that, my friends, is how we ended up in microservices hell.

Why Microservices Are Great (Sometimes)

Don’t get me wrong—microservices have their place. If you’re building a planet-scale application like Netflix, Amazon, or something that handles billions of transactions per second, breaking things into smaller, manageable services makes sense.

✅ You get independent scaling.
✅ Teams can work on different services without stepping on each other’s toes.
✅ You avoid massive monolithic deployments that bring down everything when one small thing breaks.

BUT...

Why You Probably Don’t Need Microservices

For the vast majority of applications, microservices introduce more problems than they solve. Here’s why:

🚨 Latency Everywhere – What was once a simple function call is now an HTTP request. Enjoy the network overhead!

🚨 Complexity Explosion – Hope you like managing 50 different repositories, CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and database migrations just to add a simple feature.

🚨 Debugging is a Nightmare – Was the bug in Service A? Or Service B? Maybe it’s a race condition between Service C and D? Good luck tracing that.

🚨 You Probably Don’t Have Netflix’s Engineering Budget – Let’s be real: your CRUD app with 200 daily active users does not need the architectural complexity of a global streaming giant.

A Simple Rule of Thumb

If your single, well-structured monolith is working just fine, you don’t need to smash it into a dozen microservices just because it sounds cool.

✅ If you have genuine scaling issues, sure—consider microservices.
✅ If your team is struggling with a monolith, modularize first before going full microservice-mania.
✅ If your app is simple, CRUD-heavy, and doesn’t need independent scaling, a well-structured monolith is perfectly fine.

Conclusion: Stop Overengineering

Microservices are a tool, not a default choice. Don’t let fancy tech jargon trick you into making your life harder than it needs to be.

If you’re not sure? Start with a monolith. You can always break it apart if (and that’s a big if) you actually need to.

Now go forth, write sensible code, and resist the urge to turn every project into a distributed system with 47 independent services and a Kafka queue. 🚀