Modular monoliths

If you want evidence that the software development industry is susceptible to fashion, just go and take a look at all of the hype around microservices. It's everywhere! For some people microservices is "the next big thing", whereas for others it's simply a lightweight evolution of the big service-oriented architectures that we saw 10 years ago "done right". Microservices is by no means a silver bullet though, and the design thinking required to create a good microservices architecture is the same as that needed to create a well structured monolith. And this begs the question that if you can’t build a well-structured monolith, what makes you think microservices is the answer?