Matt Ranney, a Principal Engineer at DoorDash, recently gave an interview called Microservices are Technical Debt. I had the opportunity to work with Matt at DoorDash, and we had a lot of conversations on this topic 1.

Are microservices technical debt?

I was strongly in the less-but-better-microservices camp at DoorDash. Like many things, there’s a balance to be struck. Microservices 2 are critical to any web-scale system. That said, when you start to microservice all the things you tend to trade one set of problems for another, and they are not necessarily an easier set of problems to deal with 3.

The thing I liked most about the statement Microservices are Technical Debt is that it’s provocative enough to start the right conversation. I do agree that a microservices-only architecture likely introduces more challenges and technical debt than it’s worth.

  1. Occasionally over several beers :-) ↩

  2. Maybe we should just call them “services”? ↩

  3. For instance you might take your monolith spaghetti code and turn it into distributed systems spaghetti instead. The former is a lot easier to fix and work with, IMO. ↩