[eropple]

Agreed on all counts. The only time I recommend multiple services, rather than just load-balancing across monolithic applications, is when part of it's written on a different stack. As an example: I'm writing a gizmo with a Ruby core and a NodeJS ingest endpoint, and yeah, I'll probably run them on separate machines.

But here's the dirty secret: if you have a load balancer in front of your application, you already have a way to send requests for feature X to a separate pool of machines if that feature is a hot spot for you currently--and unless your application hits some really degenerate cases your base RAM load Simply Should Not be that high for your application in the first place, making the marginal cost and machine sizing floor less of an issue.

There are benefits to microservices in some environments, chiefly to reflect your org chart when your human protocols are breaking down. They tend to be marginal, and whether they outstrip the increased overhead of dealing with more moving parts (whether in your code or not; I quite like k8s but I still wouldn't want somebody less comfortable with it than I am running it in production, and plenty of those folks do!) is in many ways up in the air.