&gt; There is more than one way to achieve scalability. Microservices is just one of the possible choices. It annoys me that developers increasingly see it as the only one.<p>Agreed.<p>You can ensure a monolith is written such that it only performs expensive operations just in time. Then sit behind a load balancer and enjoy.<p>For example say you have 12 machines serving your REST API. If one particular service&#x2F;route is impacting other services it is straightforward to deploy the entire application onto a dozen more machines and have the load balancer route the problematic service through to the new machines.<p>That won&#x27;t get you google&#x2F;facebook level scaling.... but neither will a basic microservices architecture.