This is not a real distinction, though. You can have N instances of a monolith if it's written smartly (generally speaking, where "smart" equals "is a twelve-fa

This is not a real distinction, though. You can have N instances of a monolith if it's written smartly (generally speaking, where "smart" equals "is a twelve-factor app"). And frankly, for the 95% and probably the 99% case, running a copy of each monolithic application its own auto-scaling group is probably significantly less work and less hair-pulling than the chasing the microservice dragon.