The microservices cargo cult

"They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work."

Microservices are awesome. We know this because of all the success stories that are circulating lately. The news is full of such stories, of people taking large, monolithic codebases, breaking them up, adding HTTP APIs and enjoying all the benefits.

As with all fashionable practices, it starts out innocently enough, someone tries it, it works out very well for them, they present it in an eloquent way that outlines all the advantages of the new practice, and everyone is excited and eager to try it out. Soon, you have a deluge of articles saying how well it works, and how more people tried it with great results. What you don’t hear, though, is the cases where it didn’t work, simply because people aren’t as motivated to write about their failures.

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