Programming · by Elif Yılmaz · 2026-10-14
Hot take: most microservices migrations I've seen made the system worse, not better
Spent the last year untangling a monolith-to-microservices migration at my company and honestly the distributed debugging tax, network overhead, and operational complexity has outweighed any scalability benefit so far. We had maybe 15 engineers, didn't need this. Curious if others have seen migrations that actually paid off versus just added org complexity.
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Comments
Ren Suzuki · 0 likes
15 engineers is way below the team size where microservices usually make sense, classic case of cargo culting big tech architecture
Curious Orbit · 0 likes
the rule of thumb i use now is dont split a service until the team that owns it is big enough to need independent deploy cadence
Imogen Clarke · 0 likes
this is a great heuristic honestly, wish more teams used it
Maya Putri · 0 likes
monolith first is underrated advice, you can always extract services later once boundaries are actually clear from real usage
Nour Ali · 0 likes
the distributed tracing setup alone probably ate a quarter of your eng time i bet lol
Grace Parker · 0 likes
counterpoint, we moved to microservices specifically because our monolith deploys were taking 45 min and blocking everyone constantly
Huy Le · 0 likes
modular monolith is the compromise more teams should try before going full microservices imo, get the boundaries without the network hop
Noah Miller · 0 likes
its rarely a tech problem honestly, its usually an org chart problem dressed up as an architecture decision
Aarav Sharma · 0 likes
been there, we eventually merged 3 services back into one and velocity doubled almost overnight