You broke down your monolith. Congratulations. 🎉
But if your "microservices" are all deployed together, share the same database, and a failure in one service cascades into a total system outage... you haven't built a microservices architecture.
You've built a distributed monolith.
It's the worst of both worlds: the development overhead of distributed systems combined with the tight coupling and single point of failure of a monolith. The pain is immense—debugging is a nightmare, deployments are terrifying, and true independent scalability is a myth.
The fix? Embrace asynchronous communication. Use event queues and message brokers. Enforce strict boundaries and separate data stores. The goal is resilience and autonomy, not just smaller codebases.
A service shouldn't need to know (or care) if another service is online to do its job.
What's the biggest anti-pattern you've seen in a microservices architecture?