Microservices Usually Mean a Distributed Monolith, Not Scale

So you are weighing microservices for a product your three-person team ships every week. Plenty of teams make that jump and end up with something slower and harder to run than what they started with.

The argument here is blunt: until separate teams are actually blocking each other on deploys, every network hop is a tax with no return. The answer is usually fewer moving parts, not more.

What Happened

Most teams that reach for microservices, the post argues, are just building a distributed monolith and paying extra network latency for the privilege. You do not need Kubernetes and five repos to run a product with three engineers, and a single boring service on one box will handle far more traffic than you will see this year.

The trigger for splitting is people, not load. Services should come apart when team coordination breaks down, and not as a way to scale compute. Until that happens, the network hops are pure tax.

Why It Matters

If you are the person who would end up maintaining the tracing infrastructure, this is a reason to wait. Staying on one process and keeping the database close sends your hours into shipping features instead of debugging calls between services you split too early. A three-engineer product that genuinely outgrows a single box will make that obvious on its own, and that is the moment to reconsider — not before.