Stop reaching for microservices. You are not Netflix (opens in new tab)

A few years ago, I watched a three-person team spend three months migrating a working Node.js monolith into several microservices. They had around 400 monthly active users. By the end of it, deployments took longer, debugging had become an archaeological dig across log aggregators, and shipping a feature that used to take an afternoon now took a week of cross-service coordination. They shipped less. They paid more. They were proud of the architecture. This is the trap. Microservices have beco...