The Microservices Myth
Every founder who's read a Netflix engineering blog wants microservices. We understand the appeal: independent deployments, scalability, technology diversity. These are real benefits.
But here's what the blog posts don't emphasize: Netflix has thousands of engineers. You have a team of five.
The Real Cost of Microservices
Operational overhead. Each service needs monitoring, logging, deployment pipelines, documentation. Multiply this by 10 services and you've created significant infrastructure burden.
Distributed systems complexity. Network failures, data consistency, service discovery, circuit breakers — these problems don't exist in a monolith.
Team coordination. Who owns what? How do you make changes that span services? The organizational cost is often underestimated.
Debugging difficulty. Tracing a request across 8 services is fundamentally harder than reading a stack trace.
When Microservices Make Sense
We recommend microservices when:
- You have clear bounded contexts with independent scaling needs
- Teams are large enough to own specific services (> 50 engineers)
- You need genuine polyglot architecture (rare)
- You've already hit monolith scaling limits (not theoretical, actual)
For most startups at seed or Series A? A well-structured monolith will serve you better.
Need help making the right architecture decision? Explore our software consulting services or learn how we approach architecture.
