If anyone doubts that, this very browser used to read and write is built all the way up with dozens of libraries from compression, network, image encoding, decoding, video encoding decoding, encryption, graphics, sound and what not where each library is totally separate and sometimes was never intended to be used to build web browsers by the original authors.

Rest assured, most of the business (or web 2.0 systems, search, curate, recommend, surface etc kind of) systems are a lot more simpler then an A class browser.

Unlike in Microservices where each process is possibly a totally different language, runtime and framework spun up individually that too possibly in totally different ways.

2. microservices living in monorepos is common

Scale is just one. There is also fault tolerance, security, organizational separation (which can be, up to a point, also be realized with libraries as you suggest), bigger ecosystem to choose from, …

The graph of dependencies between components makes for explicit separation of concerns just like you would have a graph of dependencies between different network services.

I also find monoliths a lot easier to debug. You have the whole call stack, and you get rid of a lot of potential sources of latency problems. You don't have RPC calls that might sometimes get forgotten.

Given the choice, I'd choose monolith every time. Unless, of course, microservices are needed for various other reasons. (Scale, the ability to distribute, etc.)

In a technical sense it is a complexity, but IME pales in comparison with the alternative of having to manage multiple services.

I actually really like this model, it's pretty flexible. You can still have specialized server instances dedicated for certain tasks, but you have one codebase. What's very sweet is that for local development, you just run a single application which (with all enabled profiles) can fulfill all the roles at the same time.

Seperate processes, yes.

One could say "In my experience, the earth is flat", but there's not much a conversation to be had there.

One could say, "In my experience, the earth is flat - I got in my car, went for a drive in one direction, and eventually hit a cliff at the ocean instead of finding myself back where I started". Now there's something to talk about.

(To be clear: this is the internet, and a limited communication medium: I'd assume OP could relate details about their experience, and it's totally reasonable that instead of taking the time to do that, they went outside and touched grass)

From a technical POV they are good for horizontally scaling different workloads which have a different resource footprint

From my experience, when a company decides to go the microservice route, it's more for the sake of solving an organizational problem (e.g. making team responsibilities and oncall escalation more clear cut) than it is to solve a technical problem. Sometimes they will retroactively cite the technical benefit as the reason for using them, but it feels like more of an afterthought

But in all honesty: microservices are very good at solving this organizational problem. If microservice x breaks, ping line manager y who manages it. Very straightforward

I see people trying to apply micro services architectures to a web app with a single developer.

As in literally taking a working monolith written by one person and having that one person split it up into tiny services.

It’s madness.

If you cannot make a clean monolith, I have never seen any evidence that the same team can make good microservices. It is just the same crap, but distributed.

The last 2 years I see more and more seasoned devs who think the opposite: monoliths are better for most projects.

Yes, but also - more difficult to refactor, more difficult to debug (good luck tracking a business transaction over multiple async services), slower with network overhead, lack of ACID transactions... Microservices solve problems which few projects have, but adds a huge amount of complexity.

Whether this is good depends on the type of changes you need to make. Just as you mentioned maintaining modularity in a monolith can be difficult with entropy tending to push the code to spaghetti, there is an equivalent risk in microservices where developers duplicate code or hack around things locally versus making the effort to change the interfaces between microservices where it would make sense.

Ultimately microservices add structure that may be useful for large enough teams, but is still overhead that has to earn its keep.

This is both true and false in a way. Sure, the same business logic is distributed across microservices, but a method call in a monolith can only fail in a couple of ways, while network calls are much more finicky - handling it in every case is pure added complexity in case of a microservice architecture.

Also, don’t forget the observability part - a mainstream language will likely have a sane debugger, profiler, a single log stream, etc. I can easily find bugs, race conditions, slow code paths in a monolith. It’s much more difficult if you have to do it in a whole environment communicating with potentially multiple instances of a single, or multiple microservices.

Lastly, we have programming languages to help us write correct, maintainable code! A monolith != spaghetti code. We have language tools to enforce boundaries, we have static analysis, etc. A refactor will work correctly across the whole codebase. We have nothing of this sort for microservices. You might understand a given microservice better, but does anyone understand the whole graph of them? Sure, monoliths might become spaghettis, but microservices can become spaghettis that are tangled with other plates of spaghettis.

You can achieve exactly the same with simple individual libraries.

I generally agree with your stance and I would add that I find the whole simplistic „microservices suck“ talking point as nonsensical as viewing them as a panacea. They do solve a few specific (for most companies, mostly organizational/human factors because scale and redundancy don’t matter that much) problems that are harder to solve with monoliths.

I still think this point is a bit misleading, because yes, the components become simpler, but their interaction becomes more complex and that complexity is now less apparent. See:

>The architecture and provisioning of microservices can be more complicated, but from the perspective of a developer working on a microservice it should be much simpler to work on compared to a monolith.

I think that perspective often doesn’t match reality. Maybe most microservice domains I‘ve seen had poorly separated domains, but changes small enough to ignore the interactions with other services have been rare in my experience.