Microservices architecture is the problem not the solution

In my years building software products, I've watched countless teams jump into microservices architecture with excitement, only to drown in unexpected complexity months later.

Small companies and startups are particularly vulnerable. They adopt microservices to "future-proof" or appear innovative to investors, but end up with distributed systems that are far more complex than their business problems actually require.

The hard truth: microservices create more problems than they solve for most organizations, especially when:

• You're burning engineering hours managing network issues, distributed transactions, and inconsistent data instead of delivering value
• Your "two-day feature" now takes two weeks because it spans five services owned by three different teams
• Developers spend more time on infrastructure than business logic
• Your CI/CD pipeline has become a beast that nobody fully understands

The tech giants popularized microservices to solve problems at massive scale. But most companies aren't operating at Google-scale and never will.

Before splitting your monolith, ask yourself: Do we genuinely need independent scaling and deployment for different components? Can our team handle the operational complexity? Are we really bottlenecked by our current architecture or just following a trend?

Sometimes the most innovative solution is the simplest one that actually matches your business needs.

What's your experience? Have you seen microservices solve more problems than they create in smaller organizations?