Practice · 2010–2020 · Cloud Scale
CQRS everywhere
Command/query separation as default architecture. Right for high-scale event domains; absurd for to-do lists.
CQRS-everywhere failed because most systems do not have conflicting read/write scaling needs worth the complexity tax. Consultants sold eventual consistency where transactions were fine. The pattern stuck in finance and logistics; the cargo cult stuck in invoices.
Cost of the fad
Teams split read and write models for CRUD apps that never needed separate projections. Double the schemas, double the bugs, double the on-call surface — for a blog admin.
Context
Split everything, then pay for the glue
Hyperscale patterns escaped the companies that needed them. Containers unified packaging; Kubernetes became the cloud OS; microservices and NoSQL were sold as defaults. Mobile-first stuck because screens changed. Cargo-cult distributed systems stuck around as invoices. The durable move was packaging and ops maturity — not rewriting every app into a mesh.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 2011–now
Event sourcing everywhere
Store every state change as an eternal log. Audit gold for some domains; operational nightmare as a default.
$ Immutable event logs for domains that needed UPDATE statements. Replay debugging sounded elegant until production needed GDPR deletes and schema migrations on millions of events.
Architecture · 2012–now
Microservices Everywhere
Independent deployability as religion. Correct for some; ruinous cargo-cult for most.
$ Teams split 4-person products into 40 services, then hired SREs to babysit the mesh. Many later consolidated — after years of distributed tracing invoices and on-call trauma. See case studies on premature microservices and big-bang cutovers for named failure modes.
Architecture · 1970–now
Modular monolith
One deployable with clear boundaries. The unfashionable default that keeps shipping while microservices argue about ownership.