I find people’s reactions to microservices to be fascinating. I have always looked at them with the same framing as Unix userland tools - many small, focused apps that do something really well, coupled with a super generic IPC mechanism - in Unix’s case, using pipes or message queues.

But Unix isn’t all small tools. We have servers for the heavy work- like databases.

The challenge then becomes; how do you design that IPC mechanism? Maybe it exists! I don’t know the answer yet. But it’s something I think about a lot and I haven’t seen compelling evidence for “microservices are always bad, no exceptions”