Microservices allow you to scale individual components of your system and reduce technical debt by isolating them. Say you have services X, Y, and Z. Service Z

Microservices allow you to scale individual components of your system and reduce technical debt by isolating them. Say you have services X, Y, and Z. Service Z handles a lot of traffic and is becoming a bottleneck to the whole system. You spin up 2-3 more instances, throw a load balancer in front of them, and increase throughput, all without ever touching the rest of the system. Pretty seamless! In addition, monolithic systems tend to be a pain in the ass for release cycles. Microservices allow you to very easily bring components up and down and do zero down time deploys by using a load balancer. Using our previous example, consider doing a release 2.0 for service Y. You spin up an additional instance of service Y with version 2.0 and the old instance is running version 1.0. You take the old instance out of the load balancer and stick the new one in. With the flip of a switch, your end user ends up using version 2.0 of service Y, without ever having to bring the system down. Now obviously microservices aren't the right design decision for every application. But as your system grows and uses different components, it's usually best to separate them out as individual services so that you can scale horizontally using load balancers.