> There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve
There's a third technical problem that microservices solve, and it's my favorite: isolation. With monoliths, you provide all of your secrets to the whole monolith, and a vulnerability in one module can access any secret available to any other module. Similarly, a bug that takes down one module takes down the whole process (and probably the whole app when you consider cascading failures). In most mainstream languages, every module (even the most unimportant, leaf node on the dependency tree) needs to be scoured for potential security or reliability issues because any module can bring the whole thing down.
This isn't solved at the language level in most mainstream languages. The Erlang family of languages generally address the reliability issue, but most languages punt on it altogether.
> The real reason that microservices may make sense is because they keep people honest around module boundaries.
Agreed. Microservices, like static type systems, are "rails". Most organizations have people who will take shortcuts in the name of expedience, and systems with rails disincentivize these shortcuts (importantly, they don't preclude them).
There's a third technical problem that microservices solve, and it's my favorite: isolation. With monoliths, you provide all of your secrets to the whole monolith, and a vulnerability in one module can access any secret available to any other module. Similarly, a bug that takes down one module takes down the whole process (and probably the whole app when you consider cascading failures). In most mainstream languages, every module (even the most unimportant, leaf node on the dependency tree) needs to be scoured for potential security or reliability issues because any module can bring the whole thing down.
This isn't solved at the language level in most mainstream languages. The Erlang family of languages generally address the reliability issue, but most languages punt on it altogether.
> The real reason that microservices may make sense is because they keep people honest around module boundaries.
Agreed. Microservices, like static type systems, are "rails". Most organizations have people who will take shortcuts in the name of expedience, and systems with rails disincentivize these shortcuts (importantly, they don't preclude them).