[cookiecaper]

I agree, but I don't think microservices are properly classed as an optimization of any sort, premature or not. Microservices arise because a company can't communicate/manage itself internally.

This does not mean that you must have one giant 50MB executable to run your whole company, but it probably does mean most companies shouldn't have 60 200-line microservices.

[boomlinde]

I think that microservices may be an actual optimization when the application flow has several clearly separable tasks that have varying requirements and you need to divide the load over several machines. For example, one task may be mostly I/O heavy, another will use a lot of RAM and a third may mostly be CPU bound. When you distribute the load over multiple servers, microservices can make it easier to tailor each server to the needs of the services it runs. The I/O bound workload doesn't need 100GB RAM and the CPU bound workload may not need several gigabit interfaces.

That said, I haven't personally worked with a microservice-based architecture where this ever became a useful optimization. Often it is exactly as you say: a technological workaround for an organizational problem.