Microservices Architecture Best Practices: A CTO's Decision Framework for 2026

I've made the microservices mistake twice. The first time, I pushed a Rails monolith serving 50,000 users into 12 separate services. Deployment frequency jumped from weekly to daily. The engineering team loved it. Then P99 latency went from 200ms to 850ms because every page load triggered six inter-service API calls. We spent three months on circuit breakers and caching just to get back to monolith performance. The second time, I said no to microservices when we hit 35 engineers. The monolith...