[midrus]

Well, no. You can deploy the same monolith to two different clusters with different resource configurations.

In fact, this is what you usually do with "worker" nodes that do background jobs.

And you can always have feature flags/environment variables to disable everything you don't need in a given cluster.

[bhuber]

I'm not saying you have to use microservices to solve these problems, just that they are potential reasons why you might want to, even with a small team of developers. I would also argue that if you're deploying the same codebase in two different places and having it execute completely different code paths, you're effectively running two separate services. Whether or not you decide to deploy a bunch of dead code (i.e. the parts of your monolith that belong to the "service" running on the other cluster) along with them doesn't change how they logically interact.