Martin Fowler is a brilliant technologist. Needless to say. This post is going to be a recap of some of my tweets on the subject of micro-services (or “microservices” as I see commonly being written). I would have quoted a bunch of other people instead, had I seen many. But that wasn’t the case, so I’ve got to quote myself then.

The first article I read about micro-services was on InfoQ.

Some time later, I saw a blog post by Martin Fowler’s article on the same subject. Then I immediately thought, as is typically the case, that the developer community was going to go crazy about the concept. I had the following reaction.

Naturally I value the thoughts and the content of the article. But I was merely concerned that many would jump straight in and make a total mess of a rather valuable insight. The topic gained popularity quite quickly, faster than I had expected though I couldn’t say I was surprised either. Reputed analysts picked up on this.

Time going by didn’t assuage my concerns, rather, I was only getting more and more confirmations. I thought that perhaps nobody is going to adjust perceptions and expectations until disaster stories would abound. I tweeted my thought on that.

Soon enough, people started posting thoughts on what was going on.

And, to keep this relatively short, here we are, somewhat full circle, with Martin Fowler inviting for some sanity. Martin opens his latest blog post

As I hear stories about teams using a microservices architecture, I’ve noticed a common pattern.

Almost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up
Almost all the cases where I’ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble.

Read Martin’s blog post here: Monolith First, by Fowler