Distributed Systems

You Don't Need Microservices (Yet)

Most teams adopt microservices before they've earned the complexity.

A distributed system is a single system pretending to be many systems. And it will remind you of that at 2AM.

Outline

  • The real cost of distributed systems
  • Coordination, retries, tracing, partial failure
  • When a monolith is faster to build and ship
  • The scale threshold where microservices make sense
  • Evolution path: monolith → modular monolith → services