https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

I draw the opposite conclusion here. In monoliths, someone else might want the code to stay in the codebase. I don't want to ask everyone about it. Everyone's responsibility is no-one's responsibility, and the code stays as is.

In a microservice, I publish an interface, and I'm free to tear up all the carpet behind it as long as it keeps doing its job as advertised. Knowing whether public routes are still in use is still a problem, so you need a minimum level of metrics or logging before you can retire an endpoint.

There are two things monoliths can't easily offer:

* Using different frameworks, languages, etc. But in my experience, it's pretty rare for a team to use many programming languages at once. Usually, it's just a few highly performance-sensitive services that need to be written in another language (say, a proxy in Rust while the rest is in Python). For that, I prefer an architecture with one main monolith plus a few high-performance satellite services. No problem there.

* More optimized scaling in certain scenarios. Say I have a module that processes files and can use all available CPU. I might want to put it in a separate container on another node so that the processing doesn't destabilize the core web server. Technically, monoliths support this too, just run the monolith in a different mode (say, behind an `--image-process` flag of sorts), and you can schedule it on another node in the same way. The only downside is that it may use more RAM than necessary for the extra binaries or scripts that won't be used

What else am I missing?

Genuinely useful method for abstraction, concern/dependency separation, scaling, and so forth, for teams & projects that genuinely need what they offer.

In our software project, we have had many issues with OOM and golang panics in a goroutine killing our critical endpoint even though the fault was most times caused in the administrational endpoints. By separating the critical endpoint from our administrational ones in two separate services, we reduced the criticality of those issues and therefore also the number of hotfixes we needed.

For a big software company, you don't have to ship a single behemoth monolith, but you don't have have microservices so small that a team of 3 has to manage 10 services.

You can have "right size" services. I don't like to call them micro because they can be fairly big and do multiple things, as long as it makes sense to have them in a single service.

https://github.com/GoPlasmatic/Orion

Design principles: * Isolate business logic from service framework using declarative coding * Make the logic representation machine-writable so AI is a first-class author * Treat business logic as versioned data, not compiled services * Ship governance with the platform, not with each service * Invoke services in-process, not over the network * Modular monolith — export and scale a service independently when needed * Push integrations into declarative connectors, keep logic pure

Sometimes you want to have some shared infra abstracted behind a single interface and a single auth model.

Having a service gives you that single isolated unit/abstraction.

In practice it’s always a scale. Some services will be bigger and some will naturally be split out.

I think also having the right server platform that makes it trivial to deploy/standup infra quickly makes this much easier.

The real—and the one thing you can't replicate—is data isolation.

Of course there are other benefits, but it's data isolation is the differentiator of micro-services and other types of architecture.

   Inside a monolith it's easy to answer questions like "Which dependencies are we shipping?"; or "Is this piece of code still used?” Once the code is spread across dozens of independent services, those answers become much harder to obtain.

It turns out, every team thinks they got the smartest people, and they all hate the idea of collaborating with the inferior teams.

Yeah, you will need microservices to bandaid your dysfunctional org. You'll keep going, slowly.

Literally the only reason I can imagine for microservices.

"Microservices" is[0] a tech industry fashion trend. It can be a real solution to a problem, too, but it's like how throwing out all your shit is the solution to depression now because a nice lady in a book said that you probably don't want all that stuff anyway. The solution is applied/suggested because it's trendy, not because it is necessarily the best fitting solution.

Like many buzzwords, 'microservice' is difficult to define. "You know it when you see it" is a euphemism for something devoid of meaning[1]: a null concept. This is a feature and not a bug. And where the term does have meaning, it's always relative -- so everyone can have microservices, and argue about who does.

[0] I do mean 'is', as opposed to 'are'

[1] it can also be the case that the speaker just doesn't know what they're talking about, and perhaps that they know it has meaning to others, social constructs, &c. To avoid spending the next three years working on this comment, I'm assuming that's not the case above.

[x] Conspiracy-theory rabbit-hole: buzzwords are like conspiracy theories in that they rely on vagueness or being undefinable. I guess my point is that concrete ideas aren't really suited to being buzzwords. Only the vague/relative/broad ones get selected (as in natural selection, not by the shady cabal of buzzword pickers), just like how only the best impossible contradictory stories tend to become popular conspiracy theories. ... actually, mostly I just thought "conspiracy-theory rabbit-hole" was a funny heading for a tangent about conspiracy theories.

[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/how-did-microservices-arc...