The problem is not micro services. The problem is that company's engineering leadership could not lead their way out of a paper bag. Micro services is an extre

The problem is not micro services. The problem is that company's engineering leadership could not lead their way out of a paper bag. Micro services is an extremely powerful pattern which solves a bazillion critical issues most important ones being: * separation of concerns * ability of different teams maintain, develop and reiterate on different subsystems independently from each other * loose coupling of the subsystems Do you have auth server that your API accesses using auth.your.internal.name which does not share its code base with the API? You have a micro service. Do you have a profile service that is responsible for the extra goodies on a profile of a user that the rest of the API business logic does not care about? You have a micro service. Do you spin up some messaging layer in a cloud that knows a few things about the API but really is only concerned with passing messages around? You have a micro service. The alternative is that you have a single code base and a single app that starts with ENV_RUNMODE=messaging or ENV_RUNMODE=API or ENV_RUNMODE=website and ENV_RUNMODE=auth ( except in the case of auth it only implements creation/changes of the new entries and a change of passwords but not validation as the validation is done by the code in any ENV_RUNMODE by accessing the auth database directly with read-write privilege and no one ever implemented deletion of the entries from the authentication database. Actually, even that would be an good step - there's no auth database because that would require knowing the mode we are running in and managing multiple sets of credentials so instead it is simply another table in a single database that stores everything ) That is the alternative to micro services. So I would argue that unless Segment has that kind of architecture it does not have a monolith. It implements a sane micro services pattern. Should the engineering be lead by a blind squirrel that once managed to find a nut, in a winter, three years ago, the sane micro services pattern would be micro serviced even more -- I call it nanoservice pattern aka LeftPad as a service. We aren't seeing it much yet but as Go becomes bigger and bigger player in shops without excellent engineering leadership I expect to see it more and more due to Go giving developers tools to gRPC between processes.