[pjc50]

In practice, it seems not to be a tradeoff but an ideology. Largely because you can't measure the counter-factual of building the app the other way.

It's been a long time since I've done "normal" web development, but I've done a number of high-performance or high-reliability non-web applications, and I think people really underestimate vertical scaling. Even back in the early 2000s when it was slightly hard to get a machine with 128GB of RAM to run some chip design software, doing so was much easier than trying to design a distributed system to handle the problem.

(we had a distributed system of ccache/distcc to handle building the thing instead)

Do people have a good example of microservices they can point us to the source of? By definition it's not one of those things that makes much sense with toy-sized examples. Things like Amazon and Twitter have "micro" services that are very much not micro.

[Treegarden]

I dont disagree, but you can horizontally scale a monolith too, no? So scaling vert vs horiz is independent of microservices, its just that separating services allows you to be precise with your scaling. Ie you can scale up a compute heavy micorservice by 100x, the upload service by 10x but keep the user service at low scale. I agree that one can vert scale, why not. And I also agree that there are probably big microservices. At my last workplace, we also had people very bullish on microservices but for bad reasons and it didn't make sense, ie ideology.