Understanding Microservices Anti-Patterns

1. Avoiding Distributed Monolith Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Services tightly coupled; deployed together; share DB; cascading failures
Cause	Splitting code without splitting data/ownership
Fix	Decompose by business capability; database per service; async events

2. Avoiding Shared Database Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Multiple services read/write same tables
Problems	Schema changes break everything; coupling; can't scale independently
Fix	Owner service exposes API/events; others integrate via API only

3. Avoiding Chatty Services Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Single user request → 50+ inter-service calls
Causes	Wrong granularity; no aggregation; N+1 across services
Fix	Aggregator/BFF; batch APIs; co-locate related capabilities

4. Avoiding God Service Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	One service owns disproportionate logic / endpoints / data
Risks	Bottleneck; single team blocks all changes; high blast radius
Fix	Decompose by subdomain; carve out bounded contexts

5. Avoiding Nanoservice Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Service so small (1 endpoint) that infra cost > benefit
Problems	Operational overhead; latency; deploy complexity
Fix	Merge with cohesive sibling; right-size to bounded context

6. Avoiding Spaghetti Architecture Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Service graph is a tangled mesh; no clear layers
Causes	Ad-hoc evolution; no architecture governance
Fix	Define layers (edge / domain / data); enforce dep direction; service catalog

7. Avoiding Wrong Cuts Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Decomposed by tech layer (UI, business, data) instead of domain
Result	Every change touches all services
Fix	Decompose by business capability / bounded context (vertical slices)

8. Avoiding Synchronous Chains Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	A → B → C → D → E synchronously per request
Risks	Latency multiplies; one slow link kills request; cascading failures
Fix	Async messaging; CQRS read models; aggregator with parallel fan-out

9. Avoiding Mega Service Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	A "microservice" with 1M LoC owning many domains
Cause	Reluctance to split; team owns too much
Fix	Strangler-fig migration; carve out subdomains incrementally

10. Avoiding Shared Library Overuse Anti-Pattern

Symptom	Detail
Sign	Domain logic in shared lib; lib bump requires N service redeploys
Problems	Re-coupling; version skew; release coordination
Fix	Limit shared libs to truly stable infra (logging, auth client); push cross-cutting concerns to sidecar/mesh