Monoliths vs Microservices

MIcroservices are all the rage. Prime is all-in on microservices, moving from RT-API to thousands of microservices (there are more services in the Prime call graph then there are engineers). They're an answer, but are they the answer? Before you can answer that you have to decide what your goals are, and what the payoff threshold is. At a high level things like separation of concerns, reduced fragility minimizing unintended side effects and reducing developers learning curves are good things. Microservices are an approach to that. Of course, like any other choice there are consequences and trade-offs. Shopify had a monolith that grew organically over time, and at some point they realized it was slowing them down. Instead of being trendy they took a different approach, the Modular Monolith, As the blog shows, microservice or modular monolith, it really comes down to graphs and interfaces. If you can get that right and enforce it you'll have an enduring architecture you can grow with.