What Even Are Microservices?

# Summary Microservices are difficult to define by technical characteristics (size, scope, lines of code), but the real value they provide is organizational rather than technical—they create boundaries that allow multiple teams to work independently and deploy on their own schedules. While microservices solve organizational bottlenecks in growing companies, they come with significant trade-offs: teams lose centralization and visibility, distributed system problems become application concerns, and inter-team communication becomes more complex and costly than simple code refactoring.