If it wasn't for a good portion of tech leads FAANG aspirational goals I bet a lot more companies would be on monoliths. It's simply staggering the productivity and cost differences (up to of course a certain point) being on monoliths vs microservices. The discussions on authorisation alone.....

> If it wasn't for a good portion of tech leads FAANG aspirational goals I bet a lot more companies would be on monoliths.

I think you inadvertently pointed out one of the advantages of microservices: the ability to bootstrap ideas without having to be hindered by artificial barriers to entry. If you have an idea and want to show it off, you just implement it and make it available to the public. Call it "aspirational goals", but I don't see any advantage in barring people from providing value without having to wrangle bureaucracies, red tape, and office politics.

If you ignore the costs from stuff like vmware, vcenter, windows server, etc... sure. But it's weird to forget that managing VMs was a huge expense even before the shift to the cloud. No one was just hosting a few dozens or a few hundreds VMs without very expensive management software.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use the cloud for deploying your software. But instead of deploying hundreds of small services, you may just deploy a handful bigger ones, and are still good. And you may also not need 30 different AWS services, you may be good with a database, maybe a message broker and a container runtime.

If you keep the infrastructure simple, it’s also much easier to switch cloud provider and to set up testing systems.