Tech Radar · caution
Microservices by default
A great answer to an org problem I usually don't have yet. Start with a modular monolith.
- Ring
- caution
- What that means
- Wary — avoiding by default.
- Movement
- Moved out
Microservices by default is a great answer to an org problem I usually don’t have yet — the coordination cost of dozens of teams needing to deploy independently. Most teams I’ve worked with are three to eight engineers, and that problem doesn’t exist for them.
What it does buy, prematurely, is a distributed system: network calls where function calls used to be, eventual consistency where a transaction used to be, and an on-call rotation that now has to reason about partial failure everywhere.
Start with a modular monolith — real module boundaries enforced by the compiler or linter, one deployable — and split a service out only when a specific, named pain shows up: a team that genuinely needs independent deploys, or a workload that needs to scale separately from the rest.