Are microservices right for you?

Assessing Microservices Suitability

Consider whether microservices are the right fit for your project before adopting them.
The stage of your application’s development is crucial; microservices work best when clear boundaries and separations are already established.
For new applications with no code written, predicting future boundaries is challenging, making microservices potentially problematic early on despite strategies like event storming and domain-driven design.
Redefining system boundaries after creating many microservices is harder than restructuring modules in a monolithic application.
Recommendation: For brand-new products, starting with a monolith is usually easier and more maintainable.

Team size is a major factor; benefits of microservices are less significant for small teams.
Personal story: Attempting microservices as a one-person team led to unnecessary complexity and late-night troubleshooting, despite correctly identified service boundaries.
Small teams are more prone to creating a distributed monolith, where complexity outweighs benefits.
As team and product scale increase, breaking into microservices can improve performance and development velocity.

Transition to microservices is recommended when scaling is required—either due to user growth or increasing team size.
Microservices enable independent scaling of high-traffic components and division of work across multiple teams.
Organizational structure often dictates software architecture; expanding teams benefit from service separation (e.g., two-pizza team principle).
Prematurely building microservices with a single team likely results in complexity without real advantages.

Adopt microservices deliberately; use Occam’s razor to choose simplicity when deciding on architecture.
Up to a certain scale, monolithic applications are almost always simpler.
Microservices architecture should not be conflated with specific technologies like Kubernetes—microservices can be implemented with various tools (e.g., AWS Lambda, event-driven Kubernetes).
Make architecture decisions independently from compute/orchestration solutions.

Carefully evaluate whether microservices are needed before adopting them.
For new products, start development with a monolith and consider microservices only as the product and team grow.
Avoid equating microservices implementation with a specific technology stack; focus on the architecture first.