[EGreg]

As someone who has built a monolith, full-stack (literally everything from MySQL to PHP+Node.js to the Web to Cordova) platform at https://qbix.com/platform I can still tell you, that microservices are great. But the average person isn't going to fine-tune all those microservices. They need to install something that just works out of the box. An expert can be hired to fine-tune some parts of the stack (e.g. add a CDN or varnish cache) and not others. The layers (e.g. database, file system) already are separated and cloud services like Amazon can even scale them automatically (e.g. Aurora or Lambda).

The main problem isn't microservices, it's control and interoperability. Facebook decides it wants to turn into TikTok? Too bad for all its users, it'll happen. "Relax, breathe, we hear you" is what Zuck said to all his outraged users after the first big rollout of newsfeed. Then a lot of scandals later (beacon, etc.) they are still at it. Google sunset Reader just like that. People are HOPING that Elon Musk adds a feature to Twitter. This is crazy.

Host stuff yourself, and not in the cloud. And for that, we need people to be able to "just install" something, like a Wordpress 5 min install on a hosting company.

I don't want to make this comment long, so anyone who wants to read the full thesis can see it here: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

[jnash]

Nothing magically makes microservices good or bad. Nothing magically makes monoliths good or bad. It all depends on how good the developers are. However it is objectively a fact that microservides are inherently more complex than monoliths. You basically take a monolith and add encode/decoding, network latency delays, no global commits, potential timing issues, partly-failed system scenarios, new types of distributed error conditions etc. to the mix. So there is zero upside to using microservices IMHO.