The End of Microservices
I&#x27;ll tell you the real reason behind microservices: developer fiefdoms. &quot;Faux-Specialization&quot;. It allows developers to feel like they have control over certain pieces of infrastructure and run the gambit on their strategy for getting ever more increasing pieces of the pie.<p>It has nothing to do with building reliable software. You could just as easily build and deploy a single networked application (so called &quot;monolith&quot;), that is composed of many different libraries that have well defined interfaces which can be tested in isolation. In fact, that&#x27;s how most non-web software is still written and done.<p>The real reason is that by having these microservices, it allows single developers or teams to own or control parts of the codebase and enforce their control via separate repo&#x27;s, and when speaking runtime, via authentication: Sally can&#x27;t see the code to Joe&#x27;s service and Joe can&#x27;t make requests to Sally&#x27;s production instance of her service that gives a guess at how long the car has to arrive to pick poor end user Bob up.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this same thing play out countless times at large tech companies and startups alike. It has nothing to do with building scalable, or more maintainable, or more cleverly designed applications. If anything, it adds more complexity because now we need to do all kinds of data marshaling, error checking, monitoring, have more infrastructure for something that should have been done in shared memory&#x2F;in-process to begin with. Not to mention all the issues and headaches caused by fan out of tons of API requests, complicated caching scenarios, etc. I&#x27;ve seen the horror of microservices architecture where no one person is responsible for the actual app, only their &quot;service&quot;.<p>There are a few exceptions where its useful to scale out parts of a distributed application, but in 99% of my experience the services aren&#x27;t a real distributed system anyway and are vaguely organized by function, developer interest, and yes, control.