They are helpful in probably 10% of cases where they are indeed the right tool for the job and the benefits outweigh the downsides.
For the majority of companies out there it's just a tool to overcomplicate your stack and turn it into an engineering playground so you can justify 2-3x the headcount despite no significant productivity increase. But hey, at least your company can now be giving talks about how they solve their (self-inflicted) problems managing all the microservices and throw that buzzword on the careers page.
People on HN seems to believe that outside of Google it is impossible to have problems that are complex and high scale, therefor if you use microservices and/or serverless and/or nosql etc etc it's just that you're following the hype, not that you legitimately benefit from them.
I think people are jaded because a lot of these use cases stem from ignorance and/or incompetence of the underlying tech. The majority of people arguing the benefits of NoSQL aren’t professional DBA’s, they’re people that don’t know how to use EXPLAIN. The majority of people touting the “infinite scale” of serverless haven’t even benchmarked their server, never mind optimised it.
Prove to me that what you’re trying to do can’t be solved with a Python script, Postgres and a beefy machine. I don’t care about the theoretical benefits of whatever you’re pushing, I want hard numbers. Unfortunately the community has spent quite a lot of its time and effort these last few years making it easy to unnecessarily scale horizontally. I want no part of that.
I think people simultaneously underestimate how many jobs out there are extremely low volume, and also underestimate how many are high volume. I'm in a data analytics space, every product in my space is talking about 10's or 100's of terabytes a day per customer, and running many different forms of analytics on that data as quickly as possible.
It's always so strange, being in this space where everyone is dealing with tons of data, and hearing constantly on HN about how "you don't need this level of scale unless you're Google".
For the majority of companies out there it's just a tool to overcomplicate your stack and turn it into an engineering playground so you can justify 2-3x the headcount despite no significant productivity increase. But hey, at least your company can now be giving talks about how they solve their (self-inflicted) problems managing all the microservices and throw that buzzword on the careers page.