Have you found yourself staring at an entire whiteboard filled with boxes and arrows, pondering whether this would become the next awesome microservices architecture or the worst distributed monolith that ever existed? Same here, and more often than I would like to admit.

Last month, I was talking to one of my cofounder friends, and he mentioned, “We have 47 services!” with pride. Then two weeks later, I was going through their docs and found out that to deploy a simple feature, I need to make changes in six of their services. What I thought was their “microservices” architecture turned out to be a monolith split into pieces, with distribution complexity but no benefits whatsoever.