[hacb]

We currently have ~40 microservices running (for the same number of devs), and having the full stack on a laptop is not possible. Especially with 80% of the devs having MacBook and Docker in a VM.

Also, this allow us (the infra folks) to chose how devs will work (partially), so it's easier for us to debug when they have issues because we do not have to deal with custom Makefiles etc.

[piva00]

Is it really needed to have 40 microservices for 40 devs? What I mean is that you generally scale out to so many services when you need each to have variable scalability, so each part of the system can scale up/down as necessary.

If you don't need this, all these services could be written as larger modules, with proper separation of concerns but easy to be deployed as a single piece. Collect some stuff that are similar in domain and create a well designed monolith. Easier for operations, easier for devs to maintain. Dependencies upgrades aren't a nightmare, or you need very good tooling to not create toil (which generally a small operation won't have).

Just throwing this in the wind because it sounds pretty heavy for a 40-body shop to be carrying as many services, at least I don't see the benefits unless for the aforementioned scalability advantage.