In my experience, most places rearchitect to microservices because they have a shitty monolith that they are dealing with. The monolith has been built over a s

In my experience, most places rearchitect to microservices because they have a shitty monolith that they are dealing with. The monolith has been built over a span of 10+ years. It is fragile, brittle, no one understands how the whole thing works, and large scale refactoring without widespread breakage is near impossible. No one wants to touch it because no one understands how the whole thing works. Because of this the codebase is also falling behind and isn't staying current with language updates (I know everyone here likes working with 10 year old tech but it does affect hiring when you have to say that you're using Java 8) But it is true that distributed monoliths are very common. One problem is that it's hard to get everyone on board with going "all the way". The question "Do we really need multiple databases" is one of the main culprits that spawn distributed monoliths.