[corpMaverick]

Microservices are an organizational technology. They allow small teams to work independently from other teams.

The most frequent problem that I see is that people design Microservices that are "small as possible" instead of "Small enough than a small team can own them". For example, I have seen teams of 5-7 developers owning 20 microservices which is crazy IMHO. I blame the pre-fix micro which is highly miss leading. Now, if you merge together these 20 tiny microservices doesn't make monolith. A monolith would be a service or application that is owned by multiple/many teams.

The other important aspect is that microservices should be loosely coupled and what I see is highly coupled microservices. How do you know you have highly coupled microservices? I have seen a few things.

- They share business logic and developers end up creating libraries with business logic which is very problematic.

- They share access to the tables.

- Changes in one often require changes in other microservices.

- Integration and unit tests are not enough. You need E2E tests, but these are hard to write and brittle.