Why Are An Elephant's Ears So Big?

RTAPI or 3000+ services? The architect says "It depends". It depends on a lot of things. And a lot of them come down to why elephants have big ears. The cube/square law. Generally speaking, surface area goes up with the square of size, while volume goes up with its cube. Consider the sphere. Surface area is πr^2, while volume is 4/3 πr^3. Comparing the titular elephant to a mouse, the elephant has a lot more body (volume) generating heat per square inch of skin (surface area) so to radiate that extra heat it has big ears to dramatically increase the surface area.

But what does that have to do with software development? Think of it this way. The surface area of your unit (function, class, package, library, executable, etc) is the collection of interfaces it presents to the outside world. The more interfaces you have, functions, arguments, config files, data files, etc, the more volume (code) you need to support it. More code means you have more opportunities for bugs. The chances for coupling and side effects is higher. You have higher cognitive load because the mental model you have to keep is that much bigger.

On the other hand, the surface area of your unit also includes how it's shared/deployed and tested. There's a certain amount of overhead to deploy or test anything, regardless of its size. Deploying/testing 1 thing to get the same functionality of 4 individual things takes the same amount of functional work, but ¼ the overhead. So you get economies of scale there. That mouse might be able to move a small piece of cheese faster than an elephant, but the elephant can move a 10 wheels of cheese faster.

So what's better, a monolith or 3000+ microservices? It depends.