Microservices is the software industryโs most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are โthinking bigโ while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if youโre not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now itโs being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.
Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isnโt sophistication. Itโs abdication.
Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You donโt โdeployโ anymoreโyou synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didnโt simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris โarchitecture.โ
Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You donโt just regret itโyou host it, version it, and monitor it.
The claim that monoliths donโt scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesnโt scale is chaos. What doesnโt scale is process cosplay. What doesnโt scale is pretending youโre Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isnโt fashionable, and boring doesnโt make conference talks.
Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistakeโit is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You donโt get โfuture proofing.โ You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.