Comment by Swizec
3 years ago
> I'm glad this is becoming conventional wisdom
My hunch is that computers caught up. Back in the early 2000's horizontal scaling was the only way. You simply couldn't handle even reasonably mediocre loads on a single machine.
As computing becomes cheaper, horizontal scaling is starting to look more and more like unnecessary complexity for even surprisingly large/popular apps.
I mean you can buy a consumer off-the-shelf machine with 1.5TB of memory these days. 20 years ago, when microservices started gaining popularity, 1.5TB RAM in a single machine was basically unimaginable.
Honestly from my perspective it feels like microservices arose strongly in popularity precisely when it was becoming less necessary. In particular the mass adoption of SSD storage massively changed the nature of the game, but awareness of that among regular developers seemed not as pervasive as it should have been.