This strikes me as false wisdom- in software it is a mistake to look at a large job that needs to be done, and insist that that job is only the purview of megacorps like Amazon or Google.
The company I work for has about 200 people and our system is at large scale, many thousands of events per second, so a microservice architecture is required. (It started out as a monolith actually, and grew out of that pattern when it didn't fit anymore.) But most people haven't heard of us.
I say you should be careful when you read stuff like this. It makes so much sense! Which is why you need to be careful of course.
> our system is at large scale, many thousands of events per second, so a microservice architecture is required.
I'm not sure if you're making a performance argument, or an organizational one. Microservices don't make things faster though. Introducing IPC where there wasn't any previously is not going to make something faster (it's going to be significantly slower 99% of the time actually) unless you also increase resources dramatically.
Well, I think an engineering team of 200 (or even 50 if 200 is your entire company) starts to exhibit some of the characteristics of a "large company". I've seen very small engineering teams succeed with microservices, but I'd say the sweet spot for moving to microservices is right between the 37 Signals "12 engineers" and your larger team.
For development purposes, it seems like head-count per-project is a more useful metric?
My impression from a past life was that even large companies didn't frequently staff hundreds of developers on the same project. Even if they might have thousands of developers overall.
The company I work for has about 200 people and our system is at large scale, many thousands of events per second, so a microservice architecture is required. (It started out as a monolith actually, and grew out of that pattern when it didn't fit anymore.) But most people haven't heard of us.
I say you should be careful when you read stuff like this. It makes so much sense! Which is why you need to be careful of course.