FAQ

The industry’s recent return to monolithic architecture is a reaction to “microservice monstrosities” built without rigors. OMI posits that microservices are not inherently flawed; rather, the failure lies in teams attempting to manage hundreds of services with insufficient organizational structure. By adhering to the “one-service-per-problem” rule, OMI-compliant primitives remain atomic and replaceable, preventing the “distributed monolith” anti-pattern.

A core tenet of the OMI is that service developers should focus exclusively on domain logic. Providing an SDK often introduces framework dependency and increases the maintenance burden. Instead, OMI encourages third-party developers to build frameworks that bind various vendors into a unified ecosystem, maintaining a clear separation between service provision and client-side consumption.

Traditional SaaS integrations often lead to “lock-in” due to proprietary data structures. OMI mitigates this through Systemic Independence (Principle 2). Services are forbidden from relying on data from “related” systems to function. By enforcing standardized domain ontologies and externalized data storage (Principle 5), the developer retains the ability to swap one OMI-compliant vendor for another without refactoring the core architecture.

OMI is not a reaction to AI but rather a proactive framework addressing the inefficiencies of current software architecture. While AI can accelerate code generation, it often leads to semantic fragmentation and increased maintenance burdens. OMI provides a standardized approach that emphasizes interchangeability and operational efficiency, ensuring that services are treated as ubiquitous utilities rather than bespoke solutions. This design predictability of any OMI certified service makes the ecosystem more accessible to LLM tools in the long run.