[markburns]

What you tend to see, is the difficulty of crossing these network boundaries (which happens anyway) _and_ all the coupling and complexity of a distributed ball of mud.

Getting engineers who don't intuitively understand or maybe even care how to avoid coupling in monoliths to work on a distributed application can result in all the same class of problems plus chains of network calls and all the extra overhead you should be avoiding.

It seems like you tell people to respect the boundaries, and if that fails you can make the wall difficult to climb. The group of people that respect the boundaries whether virtual or not, will continue to respect the boundaries. The others will spend huge amounts of effort and energy getting really good at finding gaps in the wall and/or really good at climbing.