There are fundamental reasons why microservices have become a bit less popular though. If you see a good, elegant microservice architecture, it looks very appea

There are fundamental reasons why microservices have become a bit less popular though. If you see a good, elegant microservice architecture, it looks very appealing: independently scalable parts, greater redundancy, etc. The problem comes when you try to start a new project and begin to realize that except in simple cases, it's exceptionally hard to know ahead of time how you would best be served to split an application up into services. Once there's a network boundary between two pieces of code, there's now an API that needs to be managed carefully: deployments of the two pieces of code may not be in lockstep, rolling one back may be necessary, etc. If you got the split wrong, the refactoring to fix that could be extremely hard. By comparison, splitting logical services out of a monolith isn't always a cakewalk, but it's usually more straightforward, especially since as you mentioned, it's totally possible to just share the same codebase between services. It could even be the same binary invoked differently. My feeling is that it's easier to split a monolith than to join microservices that were developed separately together; they might have different codebases and possibly even be written in different programming languages. Therefore, it's probably better to start with a monolith even if you're pretty damn sure you will need some services split off later to scale. Serverless on the other hand I am more skeptical of. I like certain products that provide generic-ish abstractions as a service: Cloud Run for example seems like a good idea, at least on paper, and Amazon Aurora seems relatively reasonable, too. But I think that they are often too expensive and do not provide enough value to justify it, especially since a lot of serverless tools don't provide terribly generic APIs or services, leading to substantial lock-in. Both microservices and serverless APIs were sold as near-panaceas to the woes of traditional monoliths, but it's a lot more complicated than that. edit: When I typed this response, the message I was replying to was different/much shorter.