Microservices, Where Did It All Go Wrong

GOTO Copenhagen 2024

Since James Lewis and Martin Fowler wrote their paper on the microservice architectural style in 2013, a lot of words have been dedicated to the subject. But many of them propagated misunderstandings of the properties of the architectural style. Mis-associations with the Cloud Native style, and misapprehensions on how to move from monolith to microservices, meant that the architectures that emerged often bear little resemblance to the original idea; most are just distributed monoliths. Unsurprisingly these architectures are painful and costly to own. Ten years later, the resulting failure to realise the benefits promised by microservices, or a misunderstanding of what they were, has led to a backlash against microservices; now the prevalent wisdom calls for a "return to the monolith," and posters on Reddit have begun to speak of "Death by a Thousand Microservices."

This talk looks at the key misunderstandings around microservices: the problems that microservices were intended to solve; "what does micro mean?"; how to achieve independent deployability; how to avoid anti-patterns like a distributed monolith. It will also explain the problems that a monolith can't solve that cause us to choose microservices.