Year-in-Review: 2023 Was a Turning Point for Microservices

FTA:

A few months earlier, the engineering team at Amazon Prime Video posted a blog post explaining that, at least in the case of video monitoring, a monolithic architecture has produced superior performance than a microservices and serverless-led approach.

I recall reading a write-up of Amazon Prime's much talked about migration away from server less and into monoliths.

The key take is that Amazon Prime's problem is being wrongly pinned on microservices by the anti-microservices crowd. It was mainly an utter failure in analysis and architecture, where system designers failed to take into account basically the performance penalty of sending data over a network and followed a cargo cult mentality of expecting a cloud provider to magically scale out to buy back the throughput that their system design killed.

Of course when they sat down and actually thought things through, eliminating the need to shuffle data around over random networks ended up avoiding the penalty caused by sending data over a network.

The important thing is that they can pin the blame of a design failure in an architecture, and the anti-microservices crowd eats it up. Except that it says nothing about either microservices or even server less architectures.