Comparison
Distributed monolithvsMicroservice
Distributed monolith
you split it into six services and still have to deploy all six together, in the right order.
A set of services with all of the operational costs of being distributed and none of the independence that was supposed to justify them. It is what you get when services are split by technical layer or by shared database rather than by ownership and change. It is the most common outcome of a microservices migration and the reason to insist on the deployment question early, because the diagnosis is easy after a year and expensive.
Full entry →Microservice
the service you own deploys on its own schedule and you have never waited for another team's release.
A service small enough to be owned, deployed and reasoned about by one team independently of the others. The unit of value is independent deployment, not size — a service that cannot be released without coordinating is not buying you anything. The price is real and permanent: every in-process call you replaced is now a network call that can be slow, partial or absent, and every debugging session now spans machines.
Full entry →