I enjoyed the article. As ever, there are tradeoffs and your milage will vary using different approaches. This doesn't seem like an entirely fair comparison:

I enjoyed the article. As ever, there are tradeoffs and your milage will vary using different approaches. This doesn't seem like an entirely fair comparison: "It seems to me that all three of these options are sub-optimal as opposed to writing the piece of code once and making it available throughout the monolithic application." There's a different scenario that could have played out with how to share a library between different services. You could have written the bulk of your application in the same language, like a monolithic application but split into several services. In that case you could create a library for your tax calculations and use it freely within your services. For me, I split my application into a small number of services and, as much as possible, split things out into libraries to make reuse simple (more libraries, thiner applications). Sometimes I use different languages, but when I do, I consider very carefully whether the (rather large) tradeoff that presents will be worth it in the long run for what I'm getting in the short term. A question: when people talk about microservices, how small are they talking?