Sure you've got waste at the small scale, but if you're building for webscale then you have to realize these are the trade offs one must make.
The worst example was a validation microservice that did things like "is True" or "is greater than 5" one element at a time on a large object. So you'd have an object with 50 elements and it would make 50 requests to the service. This was in the context of a batch processing job that handled millions of items, so billions of requests end up being created.
I tried to explain that each network request probably does a few thousand things like "if request_type == 'get'" during it's lifecycle on both sides of the transaction, but nobody got it and I quit soon after.
Next time you interview with someone, ask why they converet a system to Microservices at their last job? If they don't have an actual reason, bin them.
This microservices craze has been mind-boggling. As for many other fashions, it’s excruciatingly difficult to make young or even average senior devs understand it’s bullshit at 90%.
When Netflix does it and the self-appointed expert bloggers praise it, as a CTO or team lead you’re pretty much screwed.
I think you need to define "easier" here. It's easy to launch more instances of your rails app.