Question 1

When do microservices make financial sense?

Accepted Answer

Microservices ROI is positive when: (1) You have multiple independent teams (Conway's Law — architecture mirrors org structure); (2) Different services need different scaling profiles (pay-per-use compute savings); (3) Individual components have different reliability/deployment requirements; (4) You have 30+ engineers who coordinate on a shared codebase. For teams under 15 engineers, microservices typically add cost and complexity without proportional benefit.

Question 2

What does Kubernetes actually cost?

Accepted Answer

Kubernetes overhead on AWS EKS: control plane $0.10/hour ($73/month). Worker nodes: t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4GB) = $30/month. For 12 microservices needing 6 vCPU and 6GB total: 2x t3.medium nodes = $60/month compute. Add: networking (ALB, NAT Gateway) ~$50/month, monitoring (Datadog/Grafana) ~$100-500/month, and DevOps labor ($15,000-30,000/month for 1 FTE). Real Kubernetes cost is 70% people, 30% infrastructure.

Question 3

What is the hidden operational cost of microservices?

Accepted Answer

Hidden costs: (1) Service-to-service networking — latency, complexity, and data transfer costs ($0.01/GB within region); (2) Distributed tracing — Datadog/Jaeger/Tempo licensing; (3) Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) — adds 2-10ms latency per hop plus compute overhead; (4) Multiple deployment pipelines — each service needs its own CI/CD; (5) On-call complexity — incidents span services, harder to diagnose. Estimate 2-3x the infrastructure cost for operational overhead.

Question 4

Monolith vs microservices: what does the data say?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Prime Video moved from microservices back to a monolith for a specific component and cut costs 90%. Stack Overflow runs billions of requests on a modest monolith. Shopify, GitHub, and Basecamp run large monoliths successfully. The pattern: microservices are right for different autonomous teams scaling independently. Premature microservices add complexity and cost without benefit. 'A well-structured monolith beats a poorly structured microservices architecture every time.'

Microservices Cost Calculator — Monolith vs Microservices Cost Comparison

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