Microservices, Where Did It All Go Wrong - Ian Cooper - NDC London 2025

This talk was recorded at NDC London in London, England. #ndclondon #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper Attend the next NDC conference near you: https://ndcconferences.com https://ndclondon.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel and learn every day: / @NDC Follow our Social Media! https://www.facebook.com/ndcconferences https://twitter.com/NDC_Conferences https://www.instagram.com/ndc_conferences/ #microservices #serverless #architecture Since James Lewis and Martin Fowler wrote their paper on the microservice architectural style in 2013, a lot of words have been dedicated to the subject. But many of them propagated misunderstandings of the properties of the architectural style. Mis-associations with the Cloud Native style, and misapprehensions on how to move from monolith to microservices, meant that the architectures that emerged often bear little resemblance to the original idea; most are just distributed monoliths. Unsurprisingly these architectures are painful and costly to own. Ten years later, the resulting failure to realise the benefits promised by microservices, or a misunderstanding of what they were, has led to a backlash against microservices; now the prevalent wisdom calls for a "return to the monolith," and posters on Reddit have begun to speak of "Death by a Thousand Microservices." This talk looks at the key misunderstandings around microservices: the problems that microservices were intended to solve; "what does micro mean?"; how to achieve independent deployability; how to avoid anti-patterns like a distributed monolith. It will also explain the problems that a monolith can't solve that cause us to choose microservices.