The trade is organisational as much as technical. Microservices let separate teams ship independently without coordinating a single release, which is why they tend to appear at a certain company size rather than a certain traffic level. Below that size the coordination problem they solve does not exist, and the distributed-systems problems they create do.
Those costs are real: network calls fail in ways in-process calls do not, transactions spanning services need compensating logic instead of a database rollback, and debugging a request means tracing it across several systems. Teams that adopt microservices before they have distributed tracing, per-service ownership and automated deployment usually end up with a distributed monolith — all of the cost, none of the independence.
| Monolith | Microservices | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | One unit, all-or-nothing | Per service, independent |
| Team coordination | Required for every release | Teams ship on their own cadence |
| Debugging | One stack trace | Distributed tracing required |
| Data consistency | Database transactions | Eventual, with compensating logic |
| Best at | Small to mid teams, early product | Many teams, established boundaries |
Codazz builds this in production — Legacy Modernization.