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Software Architecture Patterns, Antipatterns, and Pitfalls
book

Software Architecture Patterns, Antipatterns, and Pitfalls

by Mark Richards, Neal Ford, Raju Gandhi
August 2026
Intermediate to advanced
450 pages
5h 12m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Software Architecture Patterns, Antipatterns, and Pitfalls

Chapter 13. Microservice All the Things Pitfall

Microservices has been a very popular architectural style for the past decade. Many architects and development teams, whether creating a microservices architecture from scratch or migrating to one from a legacy system, assume that their entire system must be microservices. This chapter demonstrates that this assumption is a pitfall: it is never a good idea, even from the start.

Table 13-1 summarizes the metadata for the Microservice All the Things pitfall. Because this chapter deals with a pitfall, no characteristics are improved. The “Degraded” metadata refers to the characteristics that are degraded when adopting this pitfall.

Table 13-1. Metadata for the Microservice All the Things pitfall
CATEGORY METADATA

CONTEXT:

Microservices, Modularity, Service Granularity

IMPROVED:

Domain Alignment

DEGRADED:

Atomicity, Cost, Data Consistency, Data Integrity, Simplicity

Should I Make Everything a Microservice?

Done right, microservices is ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0642572221119Errata Page