Microservices is an architecture where you build an application as many small, independent services.
Why choose microservices over a monolith?
Microservices fit systems that need to evolve and scale. By splitting the application into small, cohesive services, teams can deploy independently and scale only the bottleneck service instead of scaling the entire system.
Trade-offs
Operational complexity (the big cost)
- More communication overhead: network latency, timeouts, partial failures
- Harder debugging: issues span multiple services (requires tracing)
- Harder data consistency: distributed data and coordination
How to manage the trade-offs
- Strong DevOps + platform practices: CI/CD, monitoring/alerting, centralized logging, distributed tracing
- Clear service boundaries + good API contracts
- Reliability basics: timeouts, retries, circuit breakers (where appropriate)