I think in some cases at least, this is an example of cargo culting ie. copying big tech without knowing why. Other reasons include resume driven development.

I think in some cases at least, this is an example of cargo culting ie. copying big tech without knowing why. Other reasons include resume driven development. Some devs, either inexperienced or plain poor experienced ones, like to entertain themselves by making things complex. However, all of that said, in your particular case, a CI/CD pipeline using docker / EC2 doesn't really sound that mad. The patterns are super well understood there. Maybe it's just a case of getting used to it? Fwiw, we do pretty much that and we have fully automated deployments without much hassle. We use ECS / Fargate too which might sound like a other level of black magic but honestly, serverless is pretty amazing too. I don't even have to think about EC2 now. I'm not saying this to showoff, the point is that this new tech maybe takes some getting used to, but maybe it's just a lack of anyone experienced leading the way on it and helping you out? As for microservices, that can be a nightmare when done wrong but it totally depends. If you just split things up without really understanding why, you're now going to have two problems as the old adage goes. The distributed monolith is the worst of all worlds, especially when the boundaries between services are poorly thought out. If in doubt, and unless you can articulate exactly why you're creating another service, build a well structured monolith imho.