https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F0dlOMWGHE

Monolith or microservices? You've been in this meeting before. One engineer says "we need to move to microservices or we won't scale." Another one says "we tried microservices at my last company and it was a disaster." Both of them think they're arguing about architecture.

They're not. They're arguing about Conway's Law, and neither of them has noticed yet.

Here's the one-sentence version of what every balanced treatment of this topic is actually trying to tell you: microservices pay off when multiple autonomous teams need to deploy independently across cleanly separable domains. Otherwise, a monolith is cheaper. Everything below is the detail.

Microservices aren't about services

The most common definition you'll hear — "a microservice is a small service" — is wrong. Size is a symptom, not the rule.

A microservice is defined by one property: independent deployability . You can push one service without coordinating with the others. No shared database.…