I am in the middle of implementing a POC/MVP of a greenfield micro services architecture that I was assigned to do at work. My background is more monolithic an

I am in the middle of implementing a POC/MVP of a greenfield micro services architecture that I was assigned to do at work. My background is more monolithic and some SOA, so I have had to adapt my thinking to try to make this work. I am an open minded architect and always willing to explore what the good and bad takeaways are from a given approach. I think that microservice architecture gives us a chance to think about what would happen if we thought of an ecosystem of applications fully decomposed into a fabric of services. The first and hardest thing I have encountered so far, was trying to understand the right decomposition into ideal smaller units, something that is nearly impossible without understanding the requirements in full up front. I am not sure you can easily identify your service/domain contexts and boundaries (a la DDD) perfectly enough when you are doing agile development and the microservice architecture is intended to be used by many applications. However, there is a caveat- if you build modules to be smaller it is easier to reason about what each one does by itself. So that part actually fits in with Agile well. Also, if you, for a minute, imagine that network / machine boundaries didn’t have implications (latency, retries, etc.) and were as reliable as service calls, and if you imagine that we had reliable distributed two phase commit (it can be done, but all subsystems involved have to understand transactions and someone has to coordinate it)... I at least can start to see a picture that works. I believe microservice as simply to be an old idea (build in a modular small form) in a new light, and I think it is part of us trying to evolve our system development and architecture further. Don’t look at microservice as a panacea nor fad. Look at the problems it raises as opportunities to improve the problems it highlights, and then suddenly all of this might make sense as a scaled up architecture that can start small and scale smoothly to big in the future. I believe it’s all part of the same journey we all have been on, developing systems that go from local, to global and maybe someday, beyond.