Comment by makeitdouble

For whatever reason I've been thrown into a lot of companies at that exact moment when "hardware is cheap" and "not my problem" approaches couldn't cut it anymore...

So yes, it's super painful, and requires a lot of change in processes, mindsets, and it's hard to get everyone to understand things will get slower from there.

On the other end, micro-services and/or multi-DB is also super hard to get right. One of the surprise I had was all the "cache" that each services started silently adding on their little island when they realized the performance penalty they had from fetching data from half a dozen services on the more complicated operations. Or the same way DB abuse from one group could slow down everyone, and service abuse on the core parts (e.g. the "user" service) would impact most of the other services. More that a step forward, it felt a lot like a step sideways and continuing to do the same stuff, just in a different way.

My take from it was that teams that are good at split architectures are also usually good at monolith, and vice-versa. I feel from the parent who got stuck in the transition.