https://blog.matthieud.me/2019/microservices-considered-harmful/ A recent trend in our industry is the software architecture move from a monolith app to microservices, often with a related blog post explaining how much better everything is after. A recent blog post by neobank Monzo explains that they have reached the crazy amount of 1500 microservices (a ratio of ~10 microservices per engineer), and details one of the many challenges it creates (spoiler: security). In this article, I will try to debunk two supposed "benefits" of microservices: modularity and scalabity. A tentative definition It's hard to find a proper definition for the term microservice . The most frequent definition I've read is functional: it would be a smaller-than-normal (thus micro ) unit of functionality . This definition is illformed because we can always go deeper in this rabbit hole: Is performing an addition an unit of functionality? Should we have a standalone binary to do a simpl