The Myth of Monolith Simplicity
How many non-spaghetti monoliths have you come across?
Microservices require sophistication. They demand a grasp of architectural principles, distributed systems, and the discipline to design boundaries that hold.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Have you ever tried building — and keeping, over years — a truly clean, modular, performant monolith?
The idea that microservices are inherently “more complex” than a monolith is a comforting illusion.
With a monolith, you can cut corners. You can sacrifice quality. And for a while, nobody pays the price. The codebase slowly devolves into spaghetti, but the engineers who wrote it may already have moved on by the time the pain becomes unbearable.
Microservices flip that dynamic.
For architects, they demand more upfront thought.
For engineers, they require at least a basic grasp of distributed systems.
But once proper guardrails are in place, the day-to-day work is smoother. You don’t need to constantly second-guess whether your abstractions are perfect. You don’t need to carry the weight of the entire system’s cleanliness in every commit.
A monolith, by contrast, punishes any lapse in discipline. Over time, entropy wins. Maintenance becomes harder, onboarding slower, and change riskier.
With microservices, the architecture itself absorbs the mess. One service may degrade in quality, but the system continues to scale. The boundaries protect you.
The takeaway
Microservices aren’t easy. They demand maturity. But the narrative that they’re “too complex” compared to monoliths misses the point. A monolith only looks simple until you’ve lived with it long enough to see the hidden cost of undisciplined design.
Serverless, microservices, modular monoliths — none of these are silver bullets. But if you’re serious about building systems that last, don’t mistake short-term convenience for long-term simplicity.