Microservices: The Emerging Complexity Driven by Trends and Alternatives to Over‑Design

Over‑Design

The primary issue in microservices is not rooted in their architectural essence, but in the over‑design that emerges when attempting to implement such architecture without having a clear roadmap of the application’s domains or of the contextual boundaries imposed by business rules. The decomposition produces highly granular, entity‑oriented services that often result in circular dependencies, duplicated business logic, excessive events without meaningful semantics, and distributed flows that are difficult to debug. Instead of achieving autonomy and independent scalability, organizations create a distributed monolith with operational complexity multiplied by the number of deployed services. A practical criterion to avoid this outcome is to postpone decomposition until stable boundaries and non‑functional requirements are fully understood, even adopting a monolith‑first approach before splitting (Fowler, 2015; Danielyan, 2025).

Minimal API and Modular Monolith as Alternatives to Reduce Complexity

In these scenarios, it is essential to explore alternatives that allow companies to design simpler microservices without sacrificing architectural clarity or separation of concerns. One such alternative is the use of Minimal APIs to reduce complexity in the presentation layer: this approach removes ceremony (controllers, conventions, annotations) and accelerates startup while reducing container footprint. It is especially useful for utility services, CRUD operations, and limited API surfaces (Anderson & Dykstra, 2024; Chauhan, 2024; Nag, 2025).

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Another effective alternative is the Modular Monolith. A well‑modularized monolith enables isolating functional domains within internal modules that have clear boundaries and controlled interaction rules, simplifying deployment, reducing internal latency, and avoiding the explosion of operational complexity. Additionally, it facilitates a gradual migration toward microservices only when objective reasons exist (differentiated scaling needs, dedicated teams, different paces of domain evolution) (Bächler, 2025; Bauer, n.d.).

Improving the API Gateway and the Use of Event‑Driven Architectures (EDA)

The API Gateway is another critical component for managing external complexity: it centralizes security policies, versioning, rate limiting, and response transformation/aggregation, hiding internal topology and reducing client cognitive load. Patterns such as Backend‑for‑Frontend (BFF) and aggregation help decrease network trips and prevent each public service from duplicating cross‑cutting concerns (Microsoft, n.d.-b; AST Consulting, 2025).

A key principle for reducing complexity is to avoid decomposition by entities and instead guide service boundaries using business capabilities and bounded contexts. Domain‑Driven Design (DDD) provides a methodological compass to define coherent semantic boundaries; mapping bounded contexts to services (not necessarily in a 1:1 manner) reduces implicit coupling, prevents domain model ambiguity, and clarifies service responsibilities (Microsoft, n.d.-a; Polishchuk, 2025).

Finally, the use of Event‑Driven Architectures (EDA) should be applied judiciously. Although EDA enhances scalability and decoupling, poor implementation significantly increases debugging effort, introduces hidden dependencies, and complicates traceability. Mitigating these risks requires discipline in event design/versioning, the outbox pattern, idempotency, and robust telemetry (correlation IDs, DLQs), in addition to evaluating when orchestration (Sagas) is more appropriate than choreography (Three Dots Labs, n.d.; Moukbel, 2025).

Conclusion

The complexity associated with microservices arises not from the architecture itself, but from misguided adoption driven by trends. The key to reducing this complexity is prioritizing cohesion, clarity, and gradual evolution: Minimal APIs for small services, a Modular Monolith as a solid foundation, decomposition by real business capabilities and bounded contexts, a well‑defined gateway, and a responsible approach to events. Under these principles, microservices stop being a trend and become an architectural mechanism that delivers real value (Fowler, 2015; Anderson & Dykstra, 2024).

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