I've seen engineering orgs of 10-50 launch headlong into microservices to poor results. No exaggeration to say many places ended up with more repos & services than developers to manage them.
He started complaining to management that 50 CI/CD setups was his limit he could support.
He was absolutely amazed when I showed him he could combine endpoints into a larger logical service. 50 services became three, and it’s still three a few years later now.
To me it seems like microservices (or cloud, or whatever) is often overused for career/buzzword reasons. The engineers pushing for it aren't asking for your advice, they want to build an engineering playground - denying them the opportunity is unlikely to suddenly make them productive at driving the business forward with a simple stack when their original idea was to play with shiny tech instead.
The only way I see out of this is to have management buy-in to get the microservices and their developers out the door, replaced by more competent people.
This is a behavior I would say is very hard to manage out of people and should be screened for aggressively in interviews.
The most effective way to increase income for a developer is to join a place, rack up as many buzzwords as possible and leave after 2-3 years, using those buzzwords to secure a higher-paying role somewhere else. Rinse and repeat until you get a management position where you can use politics to increase your income instead.
If you want guys that use boring tech to drive the business forward you have to pay them upfront the money they’d otherwise make playing the above game. It still makes sense (an engineering playground is anything but cheap) but good luck getting an employer to pay anything above “market rate”.
I don't know if you can in general - by happy coincidence the engineer who had made that plan found his way to the door shortly thereafter
So whenever an inevitable common utility improvement is made, the effort of pushing out 100 repo releases for services no one has touch since Jim left 3 years ago is terrifying.
When there is a breaking change is going to be made and you HAVE to do the 100 releases, it's terrifying. Everyone says it never happens, but work on a project/team for 5 years and it does eventually, even once is enough to swear me off this "architecture".