[zoltrain]

I'm not even entirely sure the microservice part is the bit that's ridiculous. I remember interviewing with them a few years back and when I was told the architecture I was like "so you have all these services but you run them off the same database cluster, isn't that like super risky?"

Low and behold pretty much every major outage they've had has been because of their Cassandra cluster. To be fair they have addressed this now, but for it to take N outages and 5 years kind of tells me they could focus a little more attention on properties people value in their banks, like I don't know... uptime.

This is why they have to work pretty hard to make me switch over to it being my primary bank, and 1600 microservices communicating over the most brittle part of your stack doesn't win them any points in this space.

To put it in context I really can't remember the last time HSBC had a major outage... Sure it's boring but it works pretty much all the time.

Monzo seems more of a "60% of the time it works everytime" situation, great to send your mates money but I wouldn’t trust it to pay my rent on time. Having 1600 microservices kind of explains this.

If there’s anyone at Monzo listening, please focus on not going down as everything else you do is great.