Microservices architecture has been one of the dominant architectural trends of the past decade — and one of the most frequently misapplied. The pattern emerged from specific organizational needs at companies like Netflix and Amazon, where independent deployment of services by autonomous teams was critical to scaling both the engineering organization and the product. Those contexts don't automatically transfer to your organization.
The Distributed Systems Tax
Every microservices deployment comes with a mandatory distributed systems tax: network latency between services, complex failure modes (partial failures, cascading failures), distributed transactions (an inherently hard problem), distributed tracing and debugging, service discovery and load balancing, independent deployment pipelines for each service. These costs are worth paying when the benefits outweigh them — but only then.