I’ve said to ChatGPT 40 “I’ve heard microservices is the best software architecture”. The response is so good, I wanted to share it with you here:
Ah! That’s a very common thing to hear — but also a bit of a myth when taken at face value.
Let me put it this way:
Microservices are not the best architecture — they are one possible architecture that is good in some contexts and bad in others.
✅ When Microservices can be great:
- Large, complex systems that need to be developed and deployed by many teams independently.
- Systems with clear business domains that can be separated into autonomous parts (think: a webshop’s checkout vs. recommendation engine).
- When you need to scale parts of the system independently (e.g., payment processing needs more power than account management).
In those cases, microservices enable flexibility, scalability, and faster independent delivery — but at a cost.
❌ When Microservices can be a disaster:
- Small systems where splitting into services adds huge complexity with no real benefit.
- Teams that aren’t ready for distributed system challenges (e.g., network failures, data consistency, distributed transactions).
- Organizations without DevOps maturity — microservices need automation, monitoring, deployment pipelines.
In these cases, a simple monolith (even modularized inside) would often be more effective, cheaper, and easier to maintain.
⚖️ The key insight:
The best software architecture is the one that fits your system’s needs, your team’s capabilities, and your context — not a trend or buzzword.
🎯 Microservices should be a solution to a specific set of problems, not the default answer.
Microservices is the best software architecture