Microservice Architecture — The Wrong Turn

For over a decade, Microservice Architecture has been marketed as the ultimate solution to engineering and management challenges within IT solutions. Promoted as a way to reduce risks, accelerate development, and lower costs, these promises rarely hold up in real-world projects. Having worked extensively on IT solutions of all sizes and complexities, I’ve come to see microservice architecture as an overhyped concept, driven more by misconceptions and financial incentives than by actual business value. In this article, I break down the failure of Microservice Architecture’s promises and explain why the only real winners are those selling the tools and services—not the businesses adopting it. Defining Key Terms One of the biggest challenges in the IT industry is the misinterpretation of terminology. People often use the same words in discussions, yet each participant may assign a different meaning to them. This leads to confusion, misalignment, and poor decision-making. To ensure clarity, it is essential to establish a shared understanding of key terms before diving deeper into discussions. IT Solution – A combination of hardware, software, services, and processes designed to support a business in achieving its goals. Architecture – The fundamental structure of an IT solution, including its components, relationships, and the principles that guide its design, development, support, and evolution. Service-Oriented Architecture – An architectural approach that structures an IT solution as a collection of services. The key characteristic of this approach, in the context of this article, is that a single service is responsible for providing business functionality and executing an entire business transaction end-to-end. Microservice Architecture – An architectural approach that proposes building an IT solution as a set of small, independent services. This approach assigns the responsibility for providing business functionality and executing an entire business transaction end-to-end to a mechanism that distributes and coordinates work across multiple services. A qualified engineer should immediately question the prefix ‘micro’. If Microservice Architecture were a logical progression, we would have seen intermediate terms such as deciservices, sentiservices, or milliservices. Yet, these terms do not exist. This strongly suggests that the term ‘microservice’ was crafted more for marketing appeal than for technical accuracy. The Misleading Concept of “Small” One of the most deceptive claims about Microservice Architecture is the idea that services must be small. The term small is inherently subjective and lacks a clear definition. How small is small enough? Without an objective measure, small becomes an arbitrary guideline rather than a meaningful architectural principle. If Microservice Architecture truly had a distinct size requirement, there would be a precise definition of what qualifies as micro. Yet, none exists. This lack of definition exposes a fundamental flaw in the Microservice Architecture narrative—size is not an exclusive characteristic of Microservice Architecture but rather a vague and misleading label. In contrast, Service-Oriented Architecture imposes no strict limitations on service size. It allows services to be as fine-grained as necessary, ensuring they align with business needs rather than conforming to an artificial size constraint. The Fallacy of Independence One of the most widely promoted benefits of Microservice Architecture is the ability to develop and deploy services independently. While this sounds appealing in theory, in practice, it rarely works as intended. Most changes involve modifying a service, which often affects exposed contracts or the schema of underlying data services. Even before considering the effort required to coordinate contract changes with other teams, updating a single service without impacting others is difficult—if not impossible. Instead of achieving true independence, Microservice Architecture frequently introduces cascading dependencies. A change to one service typically requires synchronized updates across interconnected services, ultimately leading to full-system updates during a maintenance window—exactly the kind of bottleneck Microservice Architecture was meant to eliminate. Techniques such as service versioning attempt to mitigate this issue by allowing multiple versions of the same service to run concurrently. However, in reality, this introduces new challenges—including data consistency issues, increased operational overhead, and greater system complexity. Rather than enabling smooth, independent deployments, Microservice Architecture amplifies interdependencies, increases complexity, and makes the deployment process even more challenging instead of simpler. The Myth of Independent Scaling One of the most frequently touted advantages of Microservice Architecture is its ability to scale services

May 6, 2025 - 08:51

Microservice Architecture — The Wrong Turn

For over a decade, Microservice Architecture has been marketed as the ultimate solution to engineering and management challenges within IT solutions. Promoted as a way to reduce risks, accelerate development, and lower costs, these promises rarely hold up in real-world projects.

Having worked extensively on IT solutions of all sizes and complexities, I’ve come to see microservice architecture as an overhyped concept, driven more by misconceptions and financial incentives than by actual business value.

In this article, I break down the failure of Microservice Architecture’s promises and explain why the only real winners are those selling the tools and services—not the businesses adopting it.

Defining Key Terms

One of the biggest challenges in the IT industry is the misinterpretation of terminology. People often use the same words in discussions, yet each participant may assign a different meaning to them. This leads to confusion, misalignment, and poor decision-making. To ensure clarity, it is essential to establish a shared understanding of key terms before diving deeper into discussions.

IT Solution – A combination of hardware, software, services, and processes designed to support a business in achieving its goals.
Architecture – The fundamental structure of an IT solution, including its components, relationships, and the principles that guide its design, development, support, and evolution.
Service-Oriented Architecture – An architectural approach that structures an IT solution as a collection of services. The key characteristic of this approach, in the context of this article, is that a single service is responsible for providing business functionality and executing an entire business transaction end-to-end.
Microservice Architecture – An architectural approach that proposes building an IT solution as a set of small, independent services. This approach assigns the responsibility for providing business functionality and executing an entire business transaction end-to-end to a mechanism that distributes and coordinates work across multiple services.

A qualified engineer should immediately question the prefix ‘micro’. If Microservice Architecture were a logical progression, we would have seen intermediate terms such as deciservices, sentiservices, or milliservices. Yet, these terms do not exist. This strongly suggests that the term ‘microservice’ was crafted more for marketing appeal than for technical accuracy.

The Misleading Concept of “Small”

One of the most deceptive claims about Microservice Architecture is the idea that services must be small.

The term small is inherently subjective and lacks a clear definition. How small is small enough? Without an objective measure, small becomes an arbitrary guideline rather than a meaningful architectural principle.

If Microservice Architecture truly had a distinct size requirement, there would be a precise definition of what qualifies as micro. Yet, none exists.

This lack of definition exposes a fundamental flaw in the Microservice Architecture narrative—size is not an exclusive characteristic of Microservice Architecture but rather a vague and misleading label.

In contrast, Service-Oriented Architecture imposes no strict limitations on service size. It allows services to be as fine-grained as necessary, ensuring they align with business needs rather than conforming to an artificial size constraint.

The Fallacy of Independence

One of the most widely promoted benefits of Microservice Architecture is the ability to develop and deploy services independently. While this sounds appealing in theory, in practice, it rarely works as intended.

Most changes involve modifying a service, which often affects exposed contracts or the schema of underlying data services. Even before considering the effort required to coordinate contract changes with other teams, updating a single service without impacting others is difficult—if not impossible.

Instead of achieving true independence, Microservice Architecture frequently introduces cascading dependencies. A change to one service typically requires synchronized updates across interconnected services, ultimately leading to full-system updates during a maintenance window—exactly the kind of bottleneck Microservice Architecture was meant to eliminate.

Techniques such as service versioning attempt to mitigate this issue by allowing multiple versions of the same service to run concurrently. However, in reality, this introduces new challenges—including data consistency issues, increased operational overhead, and greater system complexity.

Rather than enabling smooth, independent deployments, Microservice Architecture amplifies interdependencies, increases complexity, and makes the deployment process even more challenging instead of simpler.

The Myth of Independent Scaling

One of the most frequently touted advantages of Microservice Architecture is its ability to scale services independently. However, this argument is deeply misleading. The idea that splitting a system into smaller parts to enable independent scaling is inherently beneficial ignores a fundamental reality: The overhead of fragmentation outweighs the benefits of scaling smaller services.

In reality, a larger service running in memory typically adds only a small overhead compared to a smaller one. By contrast, splitting a service into multiple microservices creates significant inefficiencies.

Rather than solving scaling problems, Microservice Architecture often creates new bottlenecks that demand significant engineering effort just to maintain stability.

While creating a dedicated service for hyper-scaling purposes might be justified in specific edge cases, blindly adopting Microservice Architecture for this reason alone is a mistake. Most scaling challenges can be solved more effectively without the burden of unnecessary fragmentation.

The Pitfall of Technology Diversity

A commonly cited advantage of Microservice Architecture is the flexibility to use different technologies for different services. While this may sound appealing in theory, in practice, it introduces more challenges than benefits.

One of the biggest issues is skill fragmentation. Teams must maintain expertise across multiple programming languages, frameworks, and tooling ecosystems, making it harder to rotate engineers between services or onboard new team members efficiently.

Maintenance complexity also increases. Different technology stacks require separate build tools, deployment pipelines, monitoring solutions, and debugging strategies. This not only adds development overhead but also complicates long-term support and troubleshooting.

Another critical drawback is the inability to share common libraries across services, such as cross-service contracts. Without a shared foundation, maintaining consistency becomes a struggle, leading to duplication of effort and a higher risk of integration issues.

The operational burden of managing a diverse technology landscape extends to infrastructure complexity and incident response. Supporting multiple runtimes, dependency management systems, and logging mechanisms makes diagnosing and resolving issues significantly harder.

While technology diversity might seem like a way to optimize individual services, in reality, it amplifies complexity, increases costs, and raises overall risks—demanding additional investment in governance and mitigation strategies just to keep systems stable.

The Major Challenge: Distributed Transactions
The single most challenging aspect of Microservice Architecture is distributed transactions—where multiple services must collaborate to complete a single business transaction or provide unified functionality. This fragmentation fundamentally breaks the simplicity of transactional integrity, leading to massive operational complexity that organizations often underestimate until it’s too late.

This challenge alone outweighs many of the so-called benefits of Microservice Architecture. It introduces several major issues:

Ensuring Data Consistency – Unlike architectures where a single service owns a transaction, Microservice Architecture requires additional mechanisms such as eventual consistency, the Saga pattern, or two-phase commit. These approaches add significant complexity and operational overhead, making it far harder to guarantee reliability.
Increased Latency – A single transaction now spans multiple network calls between services, dramatically increasing execution time and slowing down response times compared to handling the entire transaction within a single service.
Error Handling Challenges – If a failure occurs in one service, the system can be left in an inconsistent state. Implementing rollback mechanisms across multiple services is incredibly difficult, requiring compensating transactions that add further complexity and risk.
Difficult Debugging and Monitoring – Tracing an issue across multiple services is far more challenging than debugging a centralized system. It requires specialized distributed tracing tools, making issue resolution slow and resource-intensive.
Higher Development and Operations Costs – More services mean more design, more negotiations, more deployments, more servers, and more infrastructure overhead—all of which require extra time, effort, and expenses.

Many businesses only realize too late that distributed transactions introduce so much operational complexity that they eventually build centralized services to manage them—effectively recreating a monolithic system but with even greater overhead.

If there is one issue that can completely undermine the promised benefits of Microservice Architecture, it is the challenge of distributed transactions.

Why People Choose Microservice Architecture

From my experience, many organizations adopt Microservice Architecture for every possible reason—except technical necessity.

One of the primary reasons is the current state of the IT industry itself. The tech boom over the past decade has created an overwhelming demand for IT specialists, leading to an influx of low-qualified professionals across all levels—from engineers to architects and even CTOs. As a result, critical technical decisions are often made by individuals who lack deep architectural expertise, leading to choices based on trends rather than sound engineering judgment.

Time and time again, I’ve seen Microservice Architecture adopted not because of rigorous, data-driven analysis, but because of industry hype. Decision-makers typically jump on the bandwagon not because Microservice Architecture is the right choice, but because they fear being left behind.

Beyond technical ignorance, there are financial motivations behind the Microservice Architecture push. The industry is full of actors who benefit from companies building overcomplicated solutions:

Cloud providers, vendors, and consultants profit enormously from the Microservice Architecture trend. By promoting Microservice Architecture, they drive demand for service meshes, API gateways, Kubernetes, distributed tracing, and a host of other tools—all of which generate substantial revenue. The more complex the system, the greater the reliance on their infrastructure, services, and expertise.
Outsourcing and consulting companies have a strong financial incentive to promote complexity. Over-engineered solutions require larger teams, longer development cycles, and continuous maintenance contracts—all of which translate to higher revenue for service providers. The more complicated the system, the more engineers they can bill for.

In the end, the real beneficiaries of the Microservice Architecture hype are not the businesses adopting it—but rather the vendors, cloud providers, and outsourcing firms profiting from the increased complexity.

Conclusion: Is Microservice Architecture Worth It?

Given all the disadvantages outlined, it is difficult to justify adopting Microservice Architecture based on real, quantitative analysis rather than assumptions and industry trends. While Microservice Architecture is often promoted as the modern architectural standard, real-world implementations frequently expose its high complexity, operational overhead, and scalability myths.

Despite promises of independent deployment, flexibility, and better scaling, Microservice Architecture introduces significant challenges in areas such as distributed transactions, debugging, interdependencies, infrastructure management, and maintenance overhead. Instead of simplifying IT solutions, Microservice Architecture increases failure points, drives up costs, and leads to unnecessary fragmentation—issues that well-architected alternatives can typically avoid.

Like any other tool, approach, or architectural style, Microservice Architecture should never be adopted based on hype or marketing claims. Any decision to use it must be justified by real business and technical needs and backed by objective analysis rather than industry pressure.

Before choosing Microservice Architecture, organizations must ask themselves:

Do we truly understand what we are doing?
Are we solving real problems—or creating new ones?
Do we genuinely require this level of complexity, or are we just following a trend?

What has been your experience with Microservice Architecture?