Microservices Often Create Distributed Monoliths, Says Domain-Driven Design Advocate

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A software developer with a decade of microservices experience argues that the term 'microservices' is a misnomer, as teams typically split systems along technical or organisational lines rather than true functional boundaries. This approach leads to tightly coupled services that constantly call each other, producing a distributed monolith that is harder to debug than a single application. The author uses a Go-based e-commerce example to illustrate how order management, inventory, and payment services can become interdependent when split incorrectly. The proposed solution draws on Domain-Driven Design's concept of 'bounded contexts', which align service boundaries with actual business domain logic. Structuring services around genuine domain responsibilities, the author contends, makes systems easier to scale, maintain, and reason about.

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