Over-Engineering 101: Microservices Edition, Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned

Microservices are one of the most misunderstood architectural trends of the last decade. Over and over, teams jump into microservices because “that’s what big companies do,” or because the pattern looks modern, or because someone on the team watched a conference talk about it.

But here’s the blunt truth:

Microservices are not a flex, they’re a burden you take on only when the constraints of your system force your hand.

Let’s break down why.

1. Microservices Solve Organizational Problems, Not Startup Problems

Microservices were born at companies with:

  • Hundreds of engineers
  • Dozens of domain teams
  • Massive coordination overhead
  • Frequent code collisions
  • Highly varied scaling requirements

If your entire engineering team can fit in one Slack channel, you do not have these problems.

Architecture follows organizational scale. Not the other way around.

Small teams with microservices move slower, not faster. They increase cognitive load while decreasing focus.

      Small Team Monolith                      Large Team Microservices
+------------------------+                 +------------------------+
|       Single Deploy     |                 |  Service A (Domain 1)  |
|   Single Codebase       |                 +-----------+------------+
|  3–5 Devs Collaboration |                             |
+-----------+------------+                 +-----------+------------+
            |                             |  Service B (Domain 2)  |
            v                             +-----------+------------+
        Developers                        |  Service C (Domain 3)  |
        collaborate                        +------------------------+

2. Distributed Systems Are a Tax, And the Tax Is Heavy

The moment you break the monolith, you now have to care about:

  • Partial failures
  • Network timeouts
  • Retries & exponential backoff
  • Distributed transactions
  • Ordering guarantees
  • Eventual consistency
  • Saga patterns
  • API versioning
  • Cross-service observability
  • Secure service-to-service communication

In a monolith, none of this exists.

A function call is nanoseconds.
 In microservices, that same function call is now:
a network trip → serialization → potential timeout → retry → downstream impact.

Distributed systems deliver power, but only when you’re ready for the complexity they introduce.

3. Microservices Do Not Increase Velocity, They Increase Process

The promise sold to teams is autonomy: “Each team ships independently.”

The reality is:

  • You now version APIs
  • Design contracts
  • Validate payloads
  • Sync schemas or events
  • Coordinate deploys
  • Maintain backward compatibility
  • Chase failures across services
  • Debug distributed logs

What used to be one commit is now multiple services, multiple pipelines, multiple points of failure.

Unless you are a large org, microservices will slow your team down.

4. Scaling Problems Are Rare, Premature Complexity Is Everywhere

The myth:

“We need microservices to scale.”

But modern infrastructure gives you:

  • Vertical DB scaling
  • Horizontal load balancing
  • In-memory caching
  • Query optimization
  • Profiling & performance tuning
  • JVM-level optimizations(Java)
  • Resilient application servers

Most systems never hit a point where microservices become the only viable path.

You adopt microservices after you hit specific scaling pain, not because it’s trendy.

5. The Modular Monolith Is the Architecture Most Teams Actually Need

The right alternative isn’t a “big ball of mud.”
It’s a carefully structured modular monolith:

  • Strong domain boundaries
  • Clear internal modules
  • Independent layers
  • Encapsulated logic
  • Zero network overhead
  • One deployment pipeline
  • Simple local development

It gives you all the internal separation you want, without the operational chaos of microservices.

Think of it like:

Microservices on training wheels, with none of the danger.

        Modular Monolith                   Microservices
+------------------------+           +------------------------+
| Module A               |           | Service A              |
+------------------------+           +-----------+------------+
| Module B               |           | Service B              |
+------------------------+           +-----------+------------+
| Module C               |           | Service C              |
+------------------------+           +-----------+------------+
| Shared Utilities       |           | Network Communication  |
+------------------------+           +------------------------+

6. Microservices Won’t Save a Messy Codebase

There’s a myth that microservices magically create clean boundaries.

They don’t.

If your monolith is tangled, your microservices will become a distributed tangle harder to debug, harder to deploy, harder to maintain.

Microservices amplify discipline.
They do not create it.

7. You Need Real Operational Maturity Before You Attempt Microservices

Here’s the checklist nobody tells you about. Before adopting microservices, you should already have:

  • Mature CI/CD
  • Automated rollbacks
  • Centralized logs + metrics + tracing
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Proper on-call rotation
  • High observability culture
  • API governance
  • Contract testing
  • Deployment isolation
  • Clear domain ownership

If you don’t have this, microservices will expose every organizational weakness you have.

8. Use Microservices Only When They Reduce Pain — Not Add It

Legitimate reasons to go microservices:

  • Independent deploy cycles for domain teams
  • Independent scaling characteristics
  • Polyglot architecture requirements
  • Clear, well-defined bounded contexts
  • Isolated failure domains
  • Complex business domains with strong separation

If these aren’t your problems, microservices are not your solution.

9. The Best Architecture Is the One with the Least Unnecessary Complexity

Good engineering is not about flexing complexity, it’s about avoiding it.

Start with:

  • A clean monolith
  • Clear domain boundaries
  • A modular architecture
  • Solid development practices
  • Observability baked in

And as your team and operations grow, let the architecture evolve naturally.

Simplicity isn’t a phase, it’s a strategy.

Conclusion

Microservices are powerful, but they demand serious engineering maturity and operational discipline. Many teams adopt them prematurely and end up with:

  • Slower development
  • Higher complexity
  • Unpredictable failures
  • Coordination overhead
  • Painful debugging
  • Costly infrastructure

A well-designed modular monolith gives you:

  • Speed
  • Clarity
  • Simplicity
  • maintainability
  • clean boundaries
  • easy deployment

When your system eventually needs microservices, your monolith becomes the roadmap for splitting, not the obstacle.

Microservices should be a response to scale, not an aspiration.
Choose architecture with intention, not hype.

About the Author

William Achuchi
System Architect & Backend Engineer |.NET |Java & Spring Boot Enthusiast
Portfolio: https://williamachuchi.com
X (Twitter): https://x.com/dev_williee

Over-Engineering 101: Microservices Edition, Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned was originally published in Javarevisited on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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