Why Early Stage Startups Should NOT Adopt Microservices
I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here. I did an in-depth study of the microservice architecture pattern a couple of months ago. I am, for the most part, a huge fan of this approach. But I also found that there are, in fact, a few good reasons for early stage startups not to go in the direction of microservices, and not all of them have to do with the cost of infrastructure.
One of the key challenges when planning a microservice architecture is that the functionality of each service must be very well defined. Concerns must be separated adequately and there should be minimal overlap between them.
But this is extremely hard to do proactively. For codebases that evolve at a rapid scale, as is the case for most early stage companies, it can be hard to predict what the system is going to look like a couple of months down the line.
New features need to be added on an almost daily basis. This can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort as the architecture evolves and services need to be frequently rewritten to support change, causing more harm than good.
As such, it might make sense in certain cases to continue monolithic patterns until behaviour is a little more fleshed out and consistent.
Let me know what you think :-)
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