This. The key thing missing from Fowler's blog post is context. If you are a small team/company then microservices is probably not sensible unless you are highly skilled - the overhead is too high and the benefits less too.
If you are a bigger organisation though, with lots of teams, microservices are required to decouple teams and enable agility/exploration in products and services.
Lastly, it's easy to advocate the monolith ('only to start') when you're a consultant, as you've left by the time it becomes a problem. Or, you get called in down the line when it's all gone pete tong because the monolith 'prototype' has become a monster.
Note, I've spent the last two years working on microservices (which has involved a big learning curve but now yielding benefits) and also old monoliths (that have sucked up so much time it's unbelievable).
Fowler does admit to having little data on successful microservice-first companies. If anyone disagrees here, why not post some examples of it actually working out?
If you are a bigger organisation though, with lots of teams, microservices are required to decouple teams and enable agility/exploration in products and services.
Lastly, it's easy to advocate the monolith ('only to start') when you're a consultant, as you've left by the time it becomes a problem. Or, you get called in down the line when it's all gone pete tong because the monolith 'prototype' has become a monster.
Note, I've spent the last two years working on microservices (which has involved a big learning curve but now yielding benefits) and also old monoliths (that have sucked up so much time it's unbelievable).