[dmoy]

The SRE book is a decent reference, but may not be exactly what you're looking for:

https://google.github.io/building-secure-and-reliable-system...

> hearing a lot about how distributed systems are overused and usually a monolith can do a better job etc

> improve my understanding of monolith vs microservices, when to use each, and the tradeoff of preferring one over the other

A lot of this will depend on where you're working. Where I'm at, the preference is for single tasks up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 gigs of RAM and commensurate CPU. Our individual servers have just stupid amounts of RAM and CPU on them, and our deployment stack has..... nontrivial amounts of overhead for.... reasons.

But if you're e.g. deploying on AWS, the price optimization point is gonna be different. And if you're deploying while working at Amazon it'll be yet a different tradeoff (cynically, having more to do with pager duty boundaries)