Decomposition Anti-Patterns

Bad service boundaries are expensive because they do not stay on the whiteboard. Once shipped, they become deployment coupling, on-call burden, shared data ownership, and constant cross-team coordination.

The real skill is diagnosing these problems in an existing system: spotting shared databases, chatty services, or hidden coupling, and explaining why they hurt.

This chapter covers common microservices anti-patterns, what causes them, why they are harmful, and how to fix them during design or migration.