What PR Review Misses in Microservices: Hidden Runtime Coupling on the Hot Path
· 12 min read

TL;DR: A pull request can look like a small Spring Boot query change and still alter the runtime architecture of a system. In one trace-based review, a storefront product listing that used to query the product service directly started calling the inventory service on every request. The diff showed a filter. The runtime showed a new hot-path dependency, a cold-start penalty, and a fallback that would crash the storefront if inventory was down.
