"Individual microservices are less complex than monoliths" ... but the sum of microservices is still as complex as the monolith. (But better hope you got your d

"Individual microservices are less complex than monoliths" ... but the sum of microservices is still as complex as the monolith. (But better hope you got your division of domains and services correct!) "A single developer and work and test it on their local machine" ... OK I've never encountered a monolith that couldn't be run and developed locally. I don't say it was never a problem, but that there must have been other solutions to it than microservices. Surely today's laptops can easily compile and run a million lines of code... And as the counterpint, I've encountered cases of having to orchestrate 15 different micro-services locally to do anything USEFUL and non-contrived. Something to help you gain some understanding of how the WHOLE system work, and not rely on other people with the full overview to tell you can evolve your small piece of it. "rapid development" -- fix your build and test caching "only ... testing a small part of the entire architecture" -- again, with a monolith surely you can focus on a single test function / sub-component and figure out how that works. With micro-services it gets a lot harder to do integration testing across the whole system, and people tend to not do it or argue why it "isn't needed". But keep in mind that also with monoliths it is entirely possible to simple delete/not write the system integration tests. It is just that people tend to want to have them (for good reasons), but with microservices there's a much higher investment needed to get them (and they don't execute any faster, but slower, if you invest in them). This comes down to an argument of "we make such perfect code we don't need tests..."... just because it is network calls and APIs, doesn't mean that noone ever messes up and does a backwards-incompatible change. Simply dropping system integration tests and discovering bugs like that in production is an option for monoliths too.