The service sprawl is an antipattern in your microservices architecture, in which you have broken down your application into an excessively large number of very small services. While aiming for fine-grained control, it can lead to increased complexity in management, deployment, and communication, potentially outweighing the benefits.
I have seen this happen, especially in large IT organizations, that are trying to adopt microservices. It is very easy for developers and managers to fall into the everything-is-a -microservices pitfall.
So, how can you tell if your application, or company is implementing this anti pattern ?
One of the most obvious “red flags” which indicate that you have a service sprawl, is if you find that some of your developers are responsible for developing and maintaining several microservices at the same time. Of course, it might be that you have an expert developer, working on several projects at once, but this is a red flag that is worth looking into.
There are two main reasons that this is a red flag for the service sprawl:
If each developer can develop and maintain several microservices at once, it likely means those microservices are probably too thin. While that might be justified, still, it’s a good idea to look into that.
If a single developer is developing several microservices in the application, it can also mean that this application does not suffer from the drawbacks of a monolith and maybe those services could be combined into a single application, without the problems that monoliths are notorious for.
To avoid service sprawl, teams should regularly evaluate whether their microservices are delivering real separation of concerns and justifying the overhead they introduce. Not every boundary needs to be a service boundary. Sometimes, combining overly thin services into one can simplify architecture without sacrificing modularity. The goal is not to have more services, but to have the right ones.
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