ˈmaɪkrəʊˌsɜːvɪsɪz/
Definition
A distributed architecture pattern that replaces one big problem with hundreds of smaller, independently deployable problems. Celebrated for enabling team autonomy, rapid iteration, and company-wide confusion.
Common Manifestations
- Services named after Greek gods, movie villains, or emotions.
- Engineers boasting that “it’s only 30 lines of code,” while ignoring the 12 AWS resources it depends on.
- Diagrams that resemble constellations, but with less observable order.
- Deploy pipelines longer than the original monolith’s uptime.
- Bugs resolved with the phrase “That’s another team’s service.”
Usage Example
“We split the monolith into 147 microservices — now our problems scale horizontally.”
HR Guidance
Microservices encourage ownership, decentralization, and existential despair.
Teams should embrace the freedom to build, break, and forget each other’s APIs.
When outages occur, schedule a Blameless Post-Mortem across 17 time zones and call it Cross-Service Collaboration.