alt Hacker News99% of systems out there are not truly microservices but SOA(fat services). A microservice is something that send emails, transforms images, encodes video and so on. Most real services are 100x bigger than that.
Secondly, if you are not doing event sourcing from the get go, doing distributed system is stupid beyond imagination.
When you do event sourcing, you can do CQRS and therefore have zero need for some humongous database that scales ad infinitum and costs and arm and a leg.
yeah definitely agree.
Generally, the microservices that I've seen work well are the type of things that you could decide to "buy" in the build vs buy debate - like you say, stuff that are either "fire and forget" or stuff where you only care about a fixed output produced, not the guts of how it's done.
Anything that depends on your core business logic within the service (if customer type X, do custom process Y) is probably not going to be a clean fit for microservices as you'd think, especially with an emergent design.