Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. Today we’re talking to The New Stack news correspondent Mike Melanson, about his recent coverage of the ongoing debate over the value of microservices. We also discuss the top podcasts and news stories for the week, covering topics such as developer relations, mobile platform development and optimization, and distributed architectures.

We have been covering the debate over the relative merits of microservices for a while now. Microservices offer a number of advantages on the development side. Separate teams can work different parts of a language, even in their preferred languages and tools. Updates can be quietly inserted without needing to refresh the entire application. But while the hype around microservices is considerable, industry observers have been starting to recognize the limitations as well. Many have been advocated returning to the opposite approach: building single large “monolithic” applications.

Recently, Melanson wrote about Google cloud native evangelist Kelsey Hightower’s belief that monoliths are the future.

“Monoliths are the future because the problem people are trying to solve with microservices doesn’t really line up with reality,” Hightower wrote in his own blog post. A company lacking coding discipline that ends up with a disaster of a codebase may see microservices as an answer, but in reality, it is just trading class instantiation for function calls. “They’re initiating things and throwing it over a network and hoping that it comes back,” Hightower writes.