Service Decomposition Anti-Patterns#

Splitting a monolith into microservices is a common architectural goal. But bad decomposition creates systems that are harder to operate than the monolith they replaced. These anti-patterns are disturbingly common and often unrecognized until the team is deep in operational pain.

The Distributed Monolith#

The distributed monolith looks like microservices from the outside – separate repositories, separate deployments, separate CI pipelines – but behaves like a monolith at runtime. Services cannot be deployed independently because they are tightly coupled.

Terraform Code Quality#

Writing Terraform that works is easy. Writing Terraform that is safe, maintainable, and comprehensible to the next person (or agent) is harder. Most quality problems are not bugs — they are patterns that work today but create pain tomorrow: hardcoded IDs that break in a new account, missing lifecycle rules that cause accidental data loss, modules that are too big to understand or too small to justify their existence.