I have worked in small companies and big companies, on monoliths and microservices. Good and bad. Everyone has already gone into the weeds yet again on that topic.

I'm just confused on why these types of stories keep coming up recently. I thought the barrage of Sqlite was a lot, but "monolith vs. not monolith" seems to be even more frequent.

What exactly is being discussed in these cases? Most large systems don't boil down to pure "microservices" or "monolith". Look at the diagram on that page ... big clouds that talk to little clouds, big clouds that talk to yet another in-house KV store labelled "database" (that has boxes inside of it), big clouds that talk to cylinders, that in turn talk to more cylinders.

Then you get to the description ... it's Python running Distillery (custom Django), talking to "WWW" (PHP), with data stored in TAO using UDB. Add sharded MySQL, ZippyDB and Async (just to get some serverless in there?).

All of this with a term I've never had to use once in all these decades, "Server-Driven UI (SDUI)". After reading the explanation, this seems to be returning UI as JSON to be put together on the client, as to avoid waiting for a release cycle for UI changes? This sounds a lot like HTML and CSS.

What does any of this have to do with monoliths vs. microservices (or not monoliths)? I don't even know what I'd label this system. 8+ different technologies spanning server and client, but referred to as a "monolith"? That term has lost all meaning to me.

Funny they ran into timezone issues and a lot of technical debt. Now that I can relate to.