[joatmon-snoo]

Monolith vs microservice is not a dichotomy, it's a spectrum (as it is with so many other things). Individual microservices can still become monolith-y and become responsible for doing a Lot of Things (TM).

That being said, the biggest hurdle in a re-architecture project like this is usually in the "n=1 -> n=2" stage, and "n=2 -> n=5" is a lot easier: once you add service #2, you learn how to set up telemetry, permissions, billing/chargeback, alerting, etc. The next few are just repeating the same process.

[jedberg]

I always say n=2 -> n=3 is the hardest step, then n=1 -> n=2. With 1 to 2, you can take a lot of shortcuts with the n's communicating directly. With 3, you have to start formalizing message transmission either through a message bus or a cache or whatever. But once you have n=3, n=3+ is pretty easy as it's mostly edge cases to solve for or geometric scaling problems.

[joatmon-snoo]

It definitely depends on the shortcuts you take! e.g. if you run #1 and #2 with the same identity, you don't have to figure out how to make your ACLs work... but you're also breaking principle of least access :)