The idea is sound. Small, independently deployable services, each owning a clear responsibility, each exposing an API. Done well it produces systems that scale and evolve more easily.
“Done well” is doing enormous work in that sentence. Most microservices efforts I watched during the 2010s failed the same way the SOA efforts failed a decade earlier, and for the same reason: the technical decoupling was the easy part, and nobody did the organizational decoupling. If three teams still have to coordinate a release, you have not built microservices — you have built a distributed monolith, and you now pay network latency, partial failure, and operational complexity for the privilege of the same coupling you had before.
The industry has, healthily, corrected. By the early 2020s people were openly asking what comes after microservices and rediscovering the well-structured monolith. That is not a defeat; it is the pendulum finding a sensible middle.
The honest test before you start: do you have a real need for parts of the system to scale and deploy independently, and are you genuinely willing to give teams end-to-end ownership including on-call? If both are yes, microservices are a good architecture built out of APIs, and its quality will be exactly the quality of your API design and your organizational discipline. If either is no, you will get the costs without the benefits. The technology was never the hard part. It never is.
