Microservices are not the answer every time

Microservices: The Double-Edged Sword of Software Architecture 🔪

Have you ever wondered why so many companies adopt microservices, even with all the challenges?

Navdeep Singh (founder of NeetCode) and Matt Ranney (Principal Eng @ DoorDash) had an amazing conversation about microservices, and how they can be considered technical debt.

📈 In the beginning, microservices are great: Teams can work independently Deployments become faster and more frequent Scaling specific parts of the application becomes easier

🔄 But over time, complexity grows:

• A simple change can require 6 different deploys
• At DoorDash, 1 frontend call results in 1000 internal RPCs!
• Maintaining consistency between services becomes a nightmare

🧠 The problem is sociotechnical:

• With a team of 5 devs, it's easy for everyone to have the context of the entire application. - With 300 devs, who defines the boundaries between services?
• How can we ensure that everyone follows the same standards?

💡 What can we do?

• Ask yourself if you really need microservices
• If you decide to use them, start with a few well-defined ones
• Invest heavily in observability tools
• Create clear standards for communication between services

🤔 What if there was a middle ground between monolith and microservices? Matt mentions in the video that the industry needs new abstractions.

Who knows what the next solution will be?

P.S: Navdeep has AMAZING content about algorithms and data structures. And now he is expanding to system design.

Follow him and subscribe on YouTube if you like this type of content too.

Full video here: