I feel like this argument of Monolith vs Microservice is really a discussion about premature optimization. There is nothing wrong with starting out with a monolith with great design. Limiting the responsibility of the monolith is the key I believe to a maintainable piece of software. Should you need something or your business needs grow to be outside of that defined responsibility creating a new service should be discussed.

For example I have a service that hosts / streams videos. I have 1 service that handles all the metadata of the video. Handle users, discussions etc... one could even think of this as a monolith. Then video encoding piece started interfering with the metadata stuff so I decided it might be smart to separate the video encoding into its own service since it had different scaling requirements from the metadata server.

In that specific case it made a lot of sense to have 2 services I can justify it with the following reasons.

- Resource isolation is important to the performance of the application.

- having the ability to scale the encoder workers out horizontally makes sense.

So now it makes sense I’m managing 2 services.

There should be a lot of thought and reasoning behind doing engineering work. I think following trends is great for fashion products like jeans / shirts etc... but not for engineering.

If you are starting a project doing microservices chances are you are optimizing prematurely. That’s just my 2cent.