There is an endless supply of blog posts, white papers, and slide decks, evangelizing the virtues of microservices. They talk about how microservices “increase agility,” are “more scalable,” and promise that when you make the switch, engineers will be pounding at your office door looking for a job.
Let’s be clear, though occasionally exaggerated, the benefits of microservices can be real in some cases. Particularly for large organizations, with many teams, microservices can make a lot of sense. However, microservices aren’t magic — for all of their benefits, they come with significant drawbacks. In this article, I’ll describe how the distributed nature of microservices makes them inherently more complex.