What are the benefits and drawbacks of microservices?

Question

Accepted Answer

Microservices trade **operational simplicity** for **independence and scalability**. They help large systems and teams, but add distributed-systems complexity.

## Benefits

- **Independent deployment** — ship one service without a full release.
- **Independent scaling** — scale only the hot service.
- **Technology freedom** — pick the right language/DB per service.
- **Fault isolation** — one failing service need not crash the system.
- **Team autonomy** — small teams own services end to end.

## Drawbacks

```text
✗ Distributed-systems complexity (network failures, retries, timeouts)
✗ Eventual consistency instead of simple ACID transactions
✗ Harder testing & debugging across service boundaries
✗ Operational overhead (CI/CD, monitoring, tracing per service)
✗ Network latency between services
```

## The honest trade-off

```text
Monolith pain  ──────────────▶  grows with code/team size
Microservice pain ───────────▶  high fixed cost, flatter slope

→ Below a certain scale, a monolith is simply cheaper.
```

## Why it matters

The benefits are organizational and operational, not magic — they pay off when many teams need to deploy independently and scale parts differently.

The drawbacks are upfront and ongoing.

If you can't invest in automation, observability, and CI/CD, microservices will slow you down rather than speed you up.