I haven't found many articles from respected sources that will convince management that microservices are a bad idea.
There's https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.htm... , but this won't convince them.
- Who’s at the Helm? [0] - Microservices, hard as 1, 2, 3 - You can move it but complexity is still here [1] - Microservices — architecture nihilism in minimalism's clothes [2] - Do I Really Need Kubernetes? [3] - Your team might not need Kubernetes [4]
I doubt that any of those articles could convince higher management. I don't know what a "respected source" actually means. I general I believe that advice from consulting agency and cloud providers should be taken with a grain of salt.
If you drew the same conclusion from the "Who’s at the Helm?" article than I, there is only one way out which is a curated container catalog. VMware's Tanzu Application Catalog [5] is the only product in that space I'm aware of. I have quoted the price tag on HN, I think it was removed since that, so I won't repeat it here again. In any way it was magnitudes higher than the EKS base price which already seen as a showstopper by many small shops. Bottom line is: it is really hard and really expensive to operate containers in a secure manner. Probably too hard and too expensive that it would be a good idea to start with it before you actually need it.
0: https://dlorenc.medium.com/whos-at-the-helm-1101c37bf0f1 1: https://medium.com/@danielpetisme/microservices-hard-as-1-2-... 2: https://vlfig.me/posts/microservices 3: https://thenewstack.io/do-i-really-need-kubernetes/ 4: https://medium.com/faun/your-team-might-not-need-kubernetes-... 5: https://tanzu.vmware.com/application-catalog
Sure, you can run them on the same box, but it's very easy not to, and I imagine that this will absolutely crater performance (at least in the DS/ML stuff I do).
Typically speaking you're adding submillisecond latency per external call, or you've done something wrong.
Something wrong can include incorrectly organizing your system. Two separate services that constantly chat with one another should probably be considered as candidates to merge into one, for example.
Deployment matters a lot. I see people mocking systems like Kubernetes and tools like service meshes, probably because they don't understand this critical and hugely beneficial capability they bring which is to organize communication on the bases of (amongst other things) locality and system topology automatically.
In the end, most people seem to totally miss the real reason that "micro" services (the "micro" part should really be ignored today) are beneficial. Hint: it's not a technical problem being solved. It's a people problem. Service oriented architectures give very clear boundaries around which a development organization can structure in a way that allows parallel delivery.
The biggest problem any growing organization will face is: they don't pay attention is contention (yes like as in concurrency/locks/etc.) across the development team(s).
I have personally witnessed and worked with a 400+ person monolithic development organization. This was essentially a "unicorn" and an exception that proves the rule. The one and only reason this organization was successful was because they had top to bottom extreme coordination managed by a very small group that worked effectively together. Without that tight central orchestration it would've been a nightmare.
Most organizations can't orchestrate a 7 person team effectively, good luck getting 200 to share a monolith well. So you break up the org and the architecture follows, see: Conway's Law. It goes both ways, too. You break up the architecture and the org can follow.
With that in mind, it's extremely important to get your boundaries right and for the love of all that is sane in a daily job, don't break it up too much. So many organizations would triple or quadruple their productivity breaking a monolith into literally 2 parts. If you can do 3-5 that's cool, amazing! Just because you can see the dotted lines between 25 different potential services doesn't mean your organization will tolerate that.
Anyway that was a diatribe.
TL;DR: "micro" services solve PEOPLE problems, moreso than technical ones, and the price you pay is additional architectural and delivery challenges which you must balance well and plan for