[philwelch]

It’s not a question of which types of testing are easier, it’s a question of which types of testing are necessary to guarantee the same level of coverage. If you’re testing functionality that crosses a service boundary, you need to do integration testing. If you’re testing functionality that exists within a single service, you can settle for unit tests.

In a monolithic architecture where your only service boundaries are frontend-to-backend and backend-to-datastore, you still need some integration testing but not a ton. If your backend is comprised of a network of microservices, you need to integration test all of those points and, most likely, all of the data access layers that each microservice has.