Meme aside, this image really bugs me. There’s no outlet for the river; very soon the water is going to overflow that dam and that town is fucked.

I’m not sure what you mean by a “network operating system”, but monoliths are inherently just as scaleable as services.

Imagine you have a service architecture, and you are running 2 of service A, 4 of service B, and 8 of service C.

Alternatively, you could be running a monolith on 14 nodes. Most of the work those 14 nodes will be doing work that would have been covered by service C, it’s just spread out in a different way.

There’s nothing wrong with a monolith. Microservices are not inherently more scalable. Their advantage is around scaling teams. If anything, a monolith can be more performant as in-process calls are much faster thent network calls.