Microservices are an organizational scaling technique: when you have 500 developers working on one live website, it makes sense to pay the cost of a large-scale distributed system if it means the developer teams can work independently. So you give each team of 5 developers a single microservice, and that team pretends the rest of the microservices are external services they can’t trust.

If you’re a team of 5 and you have 20 microservices, and you don’t have a very compelling need for a distributed system, you’re doing it wrong. Instead of 5 people per service like the big company has, you have 0.25 people per service.