The Microservices Tax
Infrastructure overhead: 50-100% more than monolith (networking, orchestration, observability, service mesh). Operational complexity: 3-5x more deployment targets. Debugging: distributed tracing required (cost + complexity).
Microservices make economic sense when: team size >20 engineers, deployment Independence is critical, different services need different scaling, and team autonomy outweighs coordination cost.
Below 20 engineers: a well-structured monolith is almost always cheaper and faster.