Throughout my career, transitioning between CTO roles and, more recently, focusing purely on distributed systems architecture and high-performance engineering, I've seen many architectural patterns rise and fall. But few have caused as much silent damage to company bottom lines as the premature adoption of microservices.
Over the last decade, the industry bought into the idea that, in order to scale, you needed to split your system into dozens (or hundreds) of independent services. The practical result I find in most companies? The creation of the dreaded "Distributed Monolith."
The Anatomy of Waste: Networks vs. Memory
The hard truth we need to face with maturity is that microservices primarily solve problems of organizational scale (Conway's Law), not necessarily performance. If your engineering team isn't the size of Netflix or Uber, prematurely fragmenting your codebase is shooting yourself in the foot.
Technically, what happens when we break down a monolith without the proper domain boundaries? We trade extremely fast and cheap local function calls (resolved in the processor's L1/L2 Cache) for slow and expensive network calls (TCP/IP).
