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Microservices: Because Monoliths Are So 2009

6 April

If you’ve ever stared at a 10,000-line App.java file and whispered to yourself, “There has to be a better way…” — congratulations, you’ve unlocked the microservices chapter of your developer journey.

Welcome to the distributed spaghetti buffet 🍝 — where every service is its own restaurant, with its own chef, ingredients, and occasionally, its own plumbing problems.

Let’s dig into microservices: why they exist, how to not mess them up, and what they don’t tell you in the Netflix tech blog.

🧐 Why Microservices?

Because "it worked on my machine" doesn't scale.

Microservices break your application into independently deployable, loosely coupled services — each responsible for a specific piece of functionality. Think: auth service, order service, notification service, and maybe that one weird analytics service you inherited from an intern in 2018. Yes, it still works. No one knows how.

In theory, this means:

In practice, this means:

🧩 Design Principles: Or How to Avoid a Distributed Disaster

1. Single Responsibility, Not Single Line of Code

Every microservice should have a single business capability. If your “user-service” also handles emails, payments, and the office coffee machine, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not a service — it’s a Frankenstein.

2. Data Isolation: No Peeking!

Each service should own its own data. Yes, it feels wasteful to duplicate some data. Yes, it leads to eventual consistency. But it also avoids the “why did deleting a user break inventory?” conversations.

Pro tip: Embrace the chaos. Eventual consistency is a feature, not a bug. Just like Kubernetes.

3. Communication: Choose Your Weapons Wisely

Synchronous (REST, gRPC): Easy, familiar, but brittle. Asynchronous (Kafka, RabbitMQ): Resilient, scalable, but welcome to the debugging dark forest.

Use sync when you need immediate response. Use async when you want to sleep at night.

🛠️ Tooling You’ll Actually Use

🔥 Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

1. Too Many Services, Too Soon

Just because you can split everything into services doesn’t mean you should. Start with a modular monolith and break off services when needed. Otherwise, you’ll spend more time wiring things than building features.

2. Distributed Monolith

If your services can’t function independently and deployments must happen in lockstep — congrats, you just recreated a monolith with extra steps.

3. Ignoring Observability

If you don’t know what your services are doing, who they’re talking to, or how they’re failing — you’re driving blindfolded. At night. In production.

💬 Real Talk: Do You Even Need Microservices?

If your team is fewer than 5 devs, your product’s still pivoting, or your infra budget is “whatever’s free on Heroku,” then no — you probably don’t need microservices right now.

Start simple. Scale complexity only when you must. Complexity is a cost — not a badge of honor.

🧠 Final Thoughts: Herding Cats, One Service at a Time

Microservices are not a silver bullet. They’re more like a box of sharp knives — incredibly useful, but also capable of cutting you if you’re not careful.

If done right, they offer scalability, team autonomy, and faster iteration.

If done wrong, well… let’s just say I hope you enjoy reading 400-line stack traces that jump across five services.

Thanks for reading — may your services stay stateless, your queues stay unblocked, and your deployments stay drama-free. 💥