alt Hacker NewsMicroservices is bad for teams without discipline to implement "separation of concerns". They hope that physical network boundaries will force the discipline they couldn't maintain in a single codebase.
While microservices force physical separation, they don't stop "Spaghetti Architecture." Instead of messy code, you end up with "Distributed Spaghetti," where the dependencies are hidden in network calls and shared databases.
Microservices require more discipline in areas like:
Observability: Tracking a single request across 10 services. Consistency: Dealing with distributed transactions and eventual consistency. DevOps: Managing N deployment pipelines instead of one.
For most teams Modular monolith is often the better "first step." It enforces strict boundaries within a single deployment unit using language-level visibility (like private packages or modules). It gives you the "Separation of Concerns" without the "Distributed Spaghetti" network tax.
Replies
> and shared databases.
According to my understanding this is one of the reasons why microservices were invented, to prevent shared databases?
> Observability: Tracking a single request across 10 services
I'm not sure if this is a discipline issue in the way that domain driven design, say, is a discipline issue. If you instrument requests with a global ID and point at tool at it then you're basically done from the individual team perspective.