“Microservices” is the buzzword that refuses to die. We fell for the hype, thinking it would decouple our teams and speed up deployment. Instead, it introduced a new set of problems we weren’t ready for.
The Complexity Explosion
Suddenly, a simple function call became a network request. We had to handle timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers for everything. Debugging a user request meant tracing logs across 4 different services.
The “Distributed Monolith”
We didn’t actually decouple anything. Service A couldn’t deploy unless Service B was updated first. We had all the complexity of microservices with the rigidity of a monolith.
The Retreat
We identified the boundaries that actually made sense and merged the rest back into a modular monolith. Our deployment times dropped from 40 minutes to 5 minutes.
Key Takeaway
Don’t do microservices until you strictly need them to scale teams or infrastructure independently. If you are a team of 5, a monolith is your best friend.