Bob’s Story: Spaghetti Code at the Pizza Shop

In 2023, Bob opened a futuristic pizza chain.
He was told microservices were the way to go.
So he split everything into services:

• CrustService
• ToppingService
• OrderService
• DeliveryService
• NotificationService

The first few months? Great.
Fast deploys, cool architecture diagrams, CI/CD pipelines everywhere.

Then… things got weird.

• Devs spent 80% of time debugging service communication
• Deploys broke when one service changed a schema
• Monitoring became a full-time job
• Customers saw 502s when NotificationService failed

“We’re engineers,” Bob said. “Not babysitters of YAML files and message queues.”

So in 2025, they merged it all back into a monolith.

And it just… worked.

What the Experts Don’t Tell You

The Microservices Pitch:

• “You can scale teams independently!”
• “Each service can evolve freely!”
• “Deploy faster and isolate failures!”

The Reality for 80% of teams:

Before & After: The Real Architecture Shift

Microservice Era Diagram:

Monolith Return (2025)

Winner?
For Bob’s team: simplicity, testability, faster features.

Real Dev Impact: Spring Boot Example

Before (microservices, HTTP chain):

@RestController
public class OrderController {

@Autowired
    private RestTemplate restTemplate;
    @PostMapping("/order")
    public ResponseEntity<String> placeOrder(@RequestBody Order order) {
        // call toppings service
        restTemplate.postForEntity("http://topping-service/toppings", order, Void.class);
        return ResponseEntity.ok("Order Placed");
    }
}

Every service break = customer failure.
Not scalable. Not resilient. Too much boilerplate.

After (modular monolith approach):

@Service
public class OrderService {

@Autowired
    private ToppingManager toppingManager;
    public void placeOrder(Order order) {
        toppingManager.addToppings(order);
        saveOrder(order);
    }
}

One deployment. One test suite.
One happy product team.

When to Use Microservices (And When Not To)

Action

• Have you ever reverted from microservices?
• Drop a comment or share your team’s experience
• Tag a friend who’s 5 services deep and just realized their app is a glorified monolith

From the Author

“Microservices aren’t bad — but bad microservices will break your team faster than bad code.”
— Shant Khayalian

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#springboot #microservices #monolith #architecture #softwareengineering #java #devops #programming