"And you know this rewrite, like others in the past, will be a significant sink of time, and likely a catastrophe." This statement can only be true if you're u

"And you know this rewrite, like others in the past, will be a significant sink of time, and likely a catastrophe." This statement can only be true if you're using a very specific definition of "microservices". The first time I wrote about small services, in 2013 [1], I had not heard the phrase "microservices" so I used the phrase "an architecture of small apps". I was thinking of apps that talked to each via Redis, or HTTP, or didn't talk to each other and pushed everything into a database -- my idea was broad. Then in March of 2014, Martin Fowler wrote his essay on Microservices [2], which brought the phrase into widespread use. Soon after that there arose a number of startups that were promoting microservices, and they were promoting a very specific ideal: a system of apps that spoke to each other using HTTP, finding each other via auto-discovery, and offering data via a RESTful interface, with Oauth for authentication. A large number of people then began to use "microservices" for this specific set of interlocking ideas. That's fine, but it is a bit rigid. Something so comprehensive can demand a full re-write. But there is the more general idea, of slowly breaking up a monolith, and replacing small pieces with independent apps -- that does not demand a full re-write. That can be done slowly, and you have the option to keep the original monolith in a limited role, often to handle the frontend. Martin Fowler said all this in his essay, but some of the more extreme proponents of the idea have ignored the nuances that people like Fowler or myself have written about. I myself used the phrase "microservices" for a few years and now I've given up on it as too many people are associating with a very specific set of ideas, instead of the general idea of small apps cooperating with each other. All the same, the idea can be powerful. Check out "Two months early. 300k under budget" [3] [1] http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of-small-apps http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/an-architecture-of-sm... [2] https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html [3] http://thoughtworks.github.io/p2/issue09/two-months-early/ http://thoughtworks.github.io/p2/issue09/two-months-early/