> Fine until one of the microservices needs an update with new features -> new API because Something Has Changed, and suddenly...
1. Right--you only depend on other teams when you need to
2. Even in this case, you just version your API, deploy your new version at your leisure, and incrementally move people over to the new version while deprecating the old version.
> Are containers not a de facto platform?
Not in any interesting or meaningful sense. Containers are precisely the technology that allow you to pack up and go to a different orchestrator or cloud provider. Note that the original concern was being locked into a cloud provider or PaaS--what does it mean to be "locked into containers"? Who has ever been "locked into containers"?
> Here's a moderately complete list of products. How many are pay-to-play?
You're conflating a lot of things. First of all containers aren't micro services or vice versa. Containers are just an interface for processes, and they enable things like orchestrators. "Containers versus <whatever>" is orthogonal to "micro services vs monoliths". Secondly, there's nothing about paying for something that implies more lock-in. Whether you're paying or not, it's a lot easier to transition between platforms with micro services than with a monolith (micro services can move incrementally while a monolith has to move all at once or be painstakingly broken into micro services).
> All you're really doing with containers is creating a meta-monolith
With the enormous caveat that microservices can be deployed independently and even on different platforms and use different technologies... Which is to say microservices are nothing like monoliths. :)
> This makes sense at global scale where you're drowning in income and need to handle all kinds of everything for $very_large_number customers.
It makes sense if you have more than a few teams.
> It's complete madness for a small startup that doesn't even have a proven market yet.
There are degrees between "small startup without a market" and "global scale / drowning in income". But yes, I agree that microservices aren't a good fit for the very earliest, smallest-scale companies.
