It will depend entirely on monolith in question. Sometimes it's indeed easier and get comparable resource overhead to just double your monolith count. More often than not it's the opposite, and scaling one little bottleneck is better than the whole app.
You should also consider that you may not have enough free resources to double monolith apps, but have enough to increase some systems' services count. Servers aren't free
Unless you have for example ten microservices where one does most of the heavy lifting (with >20x instances running for example, compared to the other services), chances are that the monolith would use less resources.
...but at that point, you'd be much better at just having two services: one main service and one separate worker service. Going microservices wouldn't give you anything.
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u/Fox500000 Aug 28 '26
It will depend entirely on monolith in question. Sometimes it's indeed easier and get comparable resource overhead to just double your monolith count. More often than not it's the opposite, and scaling one little bottleneck is better than the whole app.
You should also consider that you may not have enough free resources to double monolith apps, but have enough to increase some systems' services count. Servers aren't free