It's a big tradeoff for maintenance complexity and cognitive load though, and people often don't realize how big that tradeoff is. Chasing bugs and maintaining the spiderweb of network connections between all your services can quickly become a nightmare. A distributed ball of mud instead of a monolithic ball of mud, but a ball of mud nonetheless.
Personally I lean towards building a monolith first, then breaking out features into separate services if you need it. But I've worked on teams that advocated for microservices needlessly, and it was 100% cargo cult behavior: "Netflix does it, so we should too."
Another anecdote: my current company, a startup, could've launched its product a year earlier than it did, but our engineering lead insisted on pre-engineering a Rube Goldberg machine of a microservices backend before we even had any prospective customers. Took months of engineering time and headaches to grok all of it, when in reality, one monolith and a basic database could've done the job for years before we'd ever have to scale past that.
But microservices architecture looks great on a resume, so /shrug
That's awful, and probably the most egregious example I've heard of a cargo cult gone wrong. The longer I'm in this field the more disappointed I am by the influence that trendy groupthink has. I know no field is immune to it, but it seems more pervasive in software.
Yeah, I don't think there's really a best approach here. I know where I work right now, we have this giant java app that is just a nightmare to even get running. I've been working on the microservices, and they do have all the downsides you're talking about, but I can get that stack up and flying super fast, whereas this giant java app takes 3 minutes to even be (barely) functional, and has so many configuration options that out of this 1000 line config file it's hard to find the 3 things you might actually care about.
Personally I lean towards building a monolith first, then breaking out features into separate services if you need it. But I've worked on teams that advocated for microservices needlessly, and it was 100% cargo cult behavior: "Netflix does it, so we should too."
Another anecdote: my current company, a startup, could've launched its product a year earlier than it did, but our engineering lead insisted on pre-engineering a Rube Goldberg machine of a microservices backend before we even had any prospective customers. Took months of engineering time and headaches to grok all of it, when in reality, one monolith and a basic database could've done the job for years before we'd ever have to scale past that.
But microservices architecture looks great on a resume, so /shrug