Do Microservices Contribute To More Technical Debt?
An interesting interview with a Principal Engineer at Doordash —Matt Ranney — took place where he expressed his point of view regarding Microservices being a form of technical debt. His opinion was mind-opening and expressed what software engineers usually encounter during the development and maintenance of Microservice architectures
To simply summarize Matt Ranney expresses his opinion that although microservices speed-up development time at the beginning, it slows us down later on and introduces friction to the development process.
He claims that those symptoms encountered in Microservices are the exact symptoms that Technical Debt exposes us to; it speeds up development at the beginning then slows us down tremendously.
But how does developing Microservice systems slow us down?
The explanation he provided was clear and was something I personally experienced.
For example, to apply a change in a system that affects three dependent microservices “A, B and C”. You have first to issue a PR to modify C service, wait for the CR to get merged and deployed, then start issuing a PR for the B service, again wait for it to get reviewed, merged and deployed before being able to finally issue a PR in the A service.
Without microservices, this would have been a single pull-request code change. The more service depth we have the higher the technical debt we encounter.
Here is the interview part where he expresses his opinion:
