How To Fail at Micro-Services

Learn about anti-patterns and bad smells with micro-services

Photo by on

Doing micro-services the wrong way can be a death sentence for your project. If your architecture resonates with some elements of today’s list, it might be a good time to stop what you’re doing and reflect on it.

First, we need to define the basic properties of micro-services. Amazing resources like and tell us they are supposed to be:

• Small in size
• Messaging enabled
• Bounded by contexts
• Autonomously developed
• Independently deployable
• Decentralized
• Built and released with automated processes
• Loosely coupled
• Focused on one thing

If you built your back-end with micro-services in mind, but don’t respect some of those properties, it’s an obvious sign you made a mistake.

But sometimes, wrong architecture choices sneak up on you. You end up with something close to micro-services but don’t respect some of their rules.

Distributed monolith