Microservice contracts can be coupled

Microservices aren’t evil or the saviour, but they are often touted as the solution to a lot of problems. One of the biggest microservice misconceptions is decoupling.

A service which sends stuff to a queue to be consumed by another service is not magically decoupled. It takes work and consistency to do that. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of service code with references to things that are only a concern for the consuming services. I.e. they’re coupled.

Further, if service A needs more data from another service, now I need to touch two code bases to make that change. If I deploy one without updating the other, it could result in a crash (though not always).

I like writing services when it makes sense but I do not agree its the panacea of all coding. For a lot of things, monolith’s or large services are more efficient. This holds especially true if your team size is small.

Tags:

#rant #microservices #design