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I cannot agree more: I worked at a company where we went from a monolith deployed on IaaS with a couple handful of engineers to Docker containers deployed on ECS with over 200 engineers. The main reason we did it was because Docker+ECS was cheaper than a bunch of EC2 instances and you can't effectively use 200+ engineers with a single monolith.

After 2 years we had over 450 microservices while keeping our AWS bill flat or slightly decreasing.

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On the other hand, over 200 engineers on payroll is way more expensive than a couple handful!

Presumably you're getting significant value out of the additional engineering work in which case the architecture shift probably makes sense (to stay aligned with the expanded organizational structure), but there are also cases where a small and flexible team maintaining a simple monolith would be much more nimble and cost-effective.

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