I believe micro-services change the trade-offs, and it's a matter of what you value more. We certainly have to invest more on infra-structure, monitoring, stan

I believe micro-services change the trade-offs, and it's a matter of what you value more. We certainly have to invest more on infra-structure, monitoring, standardisation, and we have been doing since day one - by now it's pretty robust, to the point our internal tooling allowed us to migrate from raw EC2 to kubernetes (https://www.cncf.io/case-study/nubank/ https://www.cncf.io/case-study/nubank/) and it was a transparent change to all services and teams. On the other hand, failures are more localised and we gain robustness and speed to do certain kind of changes. Your point about getting domain boundaries wrong is true, but IMO it's a pain orthogonal to micro-services. The solution is the same as if you defined a sub-optimal class interface on a big mono-repo: relentless refactoring. We are often strangling (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html) and replacing legacy services.