Comment by germandiago

I have been building a SaaS for a business. One of the decisions I took is "as monolithic as possible" (though you cannot just use that).

One reason is that microservice architecture requires much more operational overhead. So any server we have (except for the database) should be self-contained as a rule, so that it can be autonomous and horizontally scalable.

So far, it is working quite well. You do not need suddenly a Redis for one thing, a ZooKeeper for the next one, and 3 or 4 things to just run the damn binaries. The binaries will start, do whatever migrations need to be done if it applies, and start running. They only need the database. They land health checks, api calls and all the logic needed, in one binary with zero dependencies that is containerized.

This has saved me a lot of pain compared to other architectures where I worked, but those were massive and it was justified (and there was budget for it). But you just need a bunch of teams to be able to do that.

I think going the microservices way for a small team not only does not pay off. I think it can be a suicide.

At the same time, I keep the servers internally modular (enable/disable feature).