Microservices Are a Way to Organize Your Company

Microservices remind me a bit of Crocs; you either find them practical and comfortable or see them as a questionable fashion choice that somehow became acceptable.

Both perspectives have merit, honestly.

But here’s the thing: microservices aren’t only about code. They’re about how you structure your teams and organize your whole company.

We know that software teams work best when they’re small and autonomous. Microservices are an attempt to bake this principle into the very structure of a system.

The idea is that small, autonomous teams should be able to develop, deploy, and own their services independently. Teams can move fast, own their domains, and minimize cross-team dependencies. If your teams aren’t structured to take advantage of microservices, you’re just adding complexity for no real benefit.

Managing complexity

Software complexity is inevitable. The real question is how you manage it. Microservices approach complexity by breaking the system into small, independently deployable parts. This means you should be able to make changes to one service without affecting the others.

The defining feature of microservices isn’t Kubernetes or sending JSON from a service to a service. It’s autonomy. If your microservices aren’t giving your teams real autonomy, they’re not microservices.

They’re just fragmented pieces of a system with extra network latency on top.

If your services aren’t truly independent, if they have to be deployed together, tested together, or change in lockstep, you don’t have microservices.

So… It depends

So should you use microservices? It depends.

Like any architectural choice, microservices come with trade-offs.

Well-defined boundaries are hard to get right. If your services are too tightly coupled, you end up with a distributed monolith. If they’re too loosely coupled, each team duplicates the logic and reinvents the wheel.

Communication between services adds friction. In a monolith, a function call is just that, a function call. In a microservices system, that same call might involve network hops, retries, timeouts, and debugging distributed failures.

Operational overhead increases. More services mean more deployments, more monitoring, and more infrastructure complexity.

In short, microservices aren’t inherently good or bad, they’re just a tool. Like any tool, they make sense in some contexts but are overkill in others. The main reason you’d want to use them is when your company has multiple teams that own different parts of the system, and there’s an obvious benefit to those teams operating with fewer dependencies on each other. If your team boundaries clearly match up with different business features or services, then microservices can be a really practical solution. Otherwise, they introduce complexity you don’t actually need.

Conclusion

Microservices are great, but they are not for everyone. And that’s perfectly okay.

Done well, they make teams ship independently, scale easier, break complex systems into more manageable domains. But if your team structure isn’t ready for microservices, you will introduce complexity instead of reducing it.

The one question I want you to think about before jumping into migrating the entire system to a new architecture is: am I solving a technical problem or an organizational one?