reporter

Well… this is a sentence none of us had on our 2025 bingo card: The Wiggles have had to clarify that they do not, in fact, endorse getting on the pingas. The children’s entertainment juggernauts issued a statement after a TikTok featuring Blue Wiggle Anthony Field and ‘The Tree of Wisdom’ (played by his nephew, Dominic) went viral – not for the fruit salad, but for dancing behind musician Keli Holiday as his track ‘Ecstasy’ played over the clip. “We remain committed to creating safe, positive, and educational experiences for children and families.” The offending lyrics? “Hey girl, come on dance with me / You and your pocket full of ecstasy.” Needless to say, parents = pissed. The Wiggles PR department = sweating bullets. As it turns out, the whole thing was a classic case of TikTok tomfoolery: the vid was filmed at the 2025 TikTok Awards after Keli Holiday appeared onstage with the duo, but the song was added later – meaning Anthony and Dominic weren’t knowingly vibing to club-drug karaoke. The Wiggles quickly put out a statement distancing themselves from the edit, writing: “The Wiggles do not support or condone the use of drugs in any form. The content being shared was not created or approved by us, and we have asked for it to be removed.” They also reassured parents that the group remains steadfastly G-rated, continuing their statement: “We deeply value the confidence families place in us, and we remain committed to creating safe, positive, and educational experiences for children and families.” The video has since been taken down, the colours of the rainbow remain wholesome, and Anthony Field can once again return to dancing safely in the knowledge that The Tree of Wisdom is not handing out party favours. Further Reading So The Wiggles Have Just Dropped An EDM Album… And It Kinda Slaps? triple j’s Hottest 200 Of Australian Songs: The Complete List The Wiggles Condemn Use of ‘Hot Potato’ to Deter People Experiencing Homelessness in Bunbury WA The post The Wiggles Forced to Clarify They’re Not Endorsing Ecstasy After TikTok Mishap appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Fresh off unveiling their Emo Extravaganza Aussie festival plans (details below), Florida alt-rock heroes Anberlin have expanded their Australian return with two new headline shows in Adelaide and Perth next February and March. The band will be celebrating 20 years of their beloved 2005 album Never Take Friendship Personal with full-album performances, plus fan favies from across their catalogue. They’ll be joined by rising Virginia Beach outfit Broadside, who will make their long-awaited Aussie debut. Anberlin – ‘A Feel Good Drag’ Tickets go on sale this Thursday, 4th December at 9am local time via Destroy All Lines. For more than two decades, Anberlin have held a special place in the alt-rock world, with a fiercely loyal fanbase and a catalogue built on catharsis, melody and heart. To mark the anniversary, the band will perform Never Take Friendship Personal in full at every show – a rare chance to hear tracks like ‘Paperthin Hymn’, ‘A Day Late’, and ‘The Feel Good Drag’ exactly as fans first fell in love with them. The tour arrives as Anberlin step into a fresh era with Matty Mullins (Memphis May Fire) performing as the band’s live vocalist. It follows the release of Nevertake, a reimagined and re-recorded version of the classic album, bridging their early sound with who they are now. Joining them for the run are Broadside, performing both at the Emo Extravaganza festival and the newly added headline shows. With a shimmering blend of emo, pop-rock and widescreen indie influence, Broadside have evolved from underground favourites to modern-era scene staples. Their new chapter with Thriller Records has pushed their songwriting and sound into a striking new lane, powered by friendship, ambition and big heart-on-sleeve energy. Both Anberlin and Broadside will appear at the inaugural An Emo Extravaganza festival that hits Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane next February, alongside Cartel, Hot Chelle Rae and This Wild Life. Cop the details for all of Anberlin’s upcoming Aussie shows down below. Emo Extravaganza 2026 Lineup Anberlin Cartel Hot Chelle Rae Broadside This Wild Life Emo Extravaganza 2026 Dates Sunday 22nd February 2026 – PICA, Melbourne, VIC – 18+ Saturday 28th February 2026 – Roundhouse, Sydney, NSW – 18+ Sunday 1st March 2026 – Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, QLD – 18+ Tickets on sale now via Destroy All Lines Anberlin 2026 Headline Dates With Broadside Monday 23rd February 2026 – The Gov, Adelaide, SA Wednesday 25th February 2026 – Astor Theatre, Perth, WA Tickets on sale Thursday 4 December at 9am local time via Destroy All Lines. Early bird tickets available Wednesday 3 December at 9am local time Further Reading Anberlin’s Stephen Christian On Rekindling Old Friendships And The Band’s Love Affair With Australia INTERVIEW: Anberlin 2011 The Used Announce Black-Tie Symphony Show at the Sydney Opera House for 2026 The post Anberlin Expand 2026 Aussie Run Ahead of Massive Emo Extravaganza Fest appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Fresh off a sold-out debut album tour and his first-ever ARIA Award, BOY SODA is stepping into a brand-new era. The Sydney singer, rapper, songwriter and producer, AKA Brae Luafalealo, has announced his 2026 Lil’ Obsession Tour, hitting stages in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney next March. He’ll kick things off at Northcote Social Club (March 14), before heading north to Black Bear Lodge (March 21) and wrapping with a hometown finale at Heaps Normal Health Club (March 28). BOY SODA – ‘Lil’ Obsession’ It’s been a huge year for BOY SODA. His debut album SOULSTAR – released in October – has already pulled nearly 10 million streams and earned praise across the board. And between a sold-out album launch run, a standout performance at the ARIA Awards (where he made history as part of the first-ever Soul/R&B category performance), and a whirlwind creative trip through the US and New York Fashion Week, he’s cemented himself as one of Australia’s most exciting voices in modern soul. Now he’s ready to take that next leap. “We worked really hard to deliver the music,” the avant-popster says. “And I can’t wait to bring it into the live world and deliver these stories in person.” If you’ve seen BOY SODA live, you know what that means – a dynamic band, rich harmonies, glossy keys, and the kind of vulnerability and charm that makes the room lean in. His shows jump between electrifying and intimate, effortlessly blurring lines between R&B, pop, classic soul and experimental groove. SOULSTAR is the perfect snapshot of that evolution: a thirteen-track journey packed with standout moments like ‘Never The Same,’ the emotional punch of ‘Blink Twice,’ the honey-coated Dean Brady collab ‘4K,’ and his breakout single ‘Lil Obsession,’ now nearing 7 million global streams. Cop all the details of his upcoming headline shows down below. BOY SODA 2026 Lil Obsession Tour Dates DEC 29 – JAN 1, 2026 | BEYOND THE VALLEY, BARUNAH PLAINS, VIC – SOLD OUT MARCH 14 | Northcote Social Club, MELBOURNE, VIC* MARCH 21 | Black Bear Lodge, BRISBANE, QLD* MARCH 28 | Heaps Normal Health Club, SYDNEY, NSW* *PRESALE: MONDAY 1ST DECEMBER – 10AM AEDT UNTIL TUESDAY 2ND DECEMBER – 11:59PM AEDT ​*ON SALE: WEDNESDAY 3RD DECEMBER – 10AM AEDT (9AM AEST) HERE Further Reading Beyond The Valley 2025/26 Line-Up: Turnstile, Dom Dolla, Kid Cudi + More Boy Soda Announces Debut Album ‘Soulstar’, Shares Dean Brady Collab ‘4K’ BOY SODA: “I’m Navigating Everything On This Project And Figuring It Out” The post BOY SODA Announces 2026 ‘Lil’ Obsession’ Tour Following ARIA Win appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

After years of building a rep as one of the Gold Coast’s most explosive heavy acts, HAMMERS have officially announced their long-awaited debut album DEATH WOBBLES, landing Friday, 23rd January 2026 via Summerland Records. It’s been a long road since the band locked in their lineup back in 2017, but the payoff looks worth it: 12 tracks of post-hardcore grit, alternative metal swagger, and the kind of personality that’s made Hammers a local cult fave. HAMMERS – ‘Death Wobbles’ To mark the big announcement, the band have unleashed the album’s title track, a propulsive, riff-loaded punch to the throat, mixed and mastered by Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Sunk Loto, Animals As Leaders). Vocalist/guitarist Lucas Stone describes it as “riffs, hooks and neck-breakers aplenty,” and he’s not exaggerating. Lyrically, ‘Death Wobbles’ uses skating and surfing as the emotional vehicle, exploring the instability, fear, pressure and weird clarity that hits when life shakes beneath your feet. “The song traverses the heaviness of life and our imminent mortality,” Stone explains. “Love, hate, sex, violence, intention, outcome… and how we work through what tests us.” The accompanying music vid – filmed in the iconic Death Bowl at Pizzey Park – brings that metaphor to life, pairing Hammers’ performance with skate and surf chaos, all captured by local friends and frothers. “Spontaneous commitment, flow-state recovery,” Stone adds. “Drop in, hope for the best, and deal with consequences later.” The album itself has been three years in the making, with no rigid plan beyond the band’s shared philosophy: serve the song. It was produced with Forrester Savell and engineered by Michael Campbell (She Cries Wolf, Vengeance, Deficit) and Luke Palmer (Dead Letter Circus). Stylistically, the record pulls from Every Time I Die, The Bronx, He Is Legend, Better Lovers, Thrice and Stray From The Path – but still lands squarely in Hammers’ lane: heavy, scrappy, groovy, thoughtful, and distinctly Aussie. Sonically diverse and thematically loaded, the forthcoming DEATH WOBBLES LP digs into everything from nihilism and apathy to political frustration and the fragility of the human condition, all threaded with what Stone calls “fists full of love”. It marks a significant leap for a band who’ve always walked the line between tongue-in-cheek mischief and genuine emotional weight. Their past EPs Homeblokes (2018) and Kicking Goals (2020) laid the groundwork, but this album feels like Hammers locking into their most realised form yet. The band’s work ethic hasn’t slowed either – they spent 2024 headlining in New Zealand and Japan, have shared stages with Mammal, He Is Legend and The Butterfly Effect, and are currently in the middle of their Moment of Struth headline run before wrapping the year warming up the stage for Cog. And yep, there’s more on the way – more videos, more touring, more merch, and, in their words, “more dumb pirate skullduggery.” As Stone puts it: “I feel like where we are at globally as a species, we are straight-up mid Death Wobbles… Finally releasing a debut Hammers album feels kinda the same as the build up to ya first orgasm, only heaps better.” You can pre-order the LP here, or take title track ‘Death Wobbles’ for a spin up above. HAMMERS 2025 Tour Dates Supporting COG SATURDAY 6 DECEMBER – KINGS BEACH TAVERN, SUNSHINE COAST QLD SATURDAY 20 DECEMBER – HOTEL NORTHERN, BYRON BAY NSW Tickets on sale now via https://www.hammersofficial.com/ Further Reading Cog Return With First New Music In Six Years, ‘Walk The Line’ Artist on Artist: He Is Legend & Hammers Get to Know Each Other Ahead of National Tour Redd Kross & Hard-Ons Announce 2026 Co-Headline Australian Tour The post Hammers Announce Debut Album ‘Death Wobbles’ for January 2026, Drop Title Track appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has updated its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog to include a security flaw impacting OpenPLC ScadaBR, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2021-26829 (CVSS score: 5.4), a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that affects Windows and Linux versions of the software viaView the full article

Some schools were concerned that they could not put on the traditional Nativity play after the UK Supreme Court ruling.View the full article

The fourth Sunday before Christmas is called Advent Sunday. It falls at the start of December, or sometimes as in 2025, at the end of November. In churches of many denominations, Advent marks the coming of the Christmas season. This is the story …View the full article

30 November is St Andrew’s day. He was the brother of St Peter, the first of Jesus’s disciples, and later an Apostle. This is the story …View the full article

Amid a rash of mass kidnappings in Nigeria, an Anglican priest in Nigeria abducted along with his wife and daughter has died in captivity, leaders of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion announced on Wednesday.View the full article

A Sudanese refugee threatened to stab a Christian street preacher at Speakers' Corner in London earlier this year, a court has heard. View the full article

A new complaint against disgraced priest David Tudor has been upheld by a Southwark Diocese tribunal. View the full article

The event is part of the Football Association’s strategy to use ‘the beautiful game’ to bring communities together.View the full article

Being charitable to others was not the same thing as imposing "compulsory taxation in order to pay welfare", she argued.View the full article

The security forces have so far failed to stem the violence.View the full article

Assisted suicide remains a highly controversial issue.View the full article

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered vulnerable code in legacy Python packages that could potentially pave the way for a supply chain compromise on the Python Package Index (PyPI) via a domain takeover attack. Software supply chain security company ReversingLabs said it found the "vulnerability" in bootstrap files provided by a build and deployment automation tool named "zc.buildout." "TheView the full article

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have continued to flood the npm registry with 197 more malicious packages since last month. According to Socket, these packages have been downloaded over 31,000 times, and are designed to deliver a variant of OtterCookie that brings together the features of BeaverTail and prior versions of OtterCookie. Some of theView the full article

Do you know who managed to cut costs by a staggering 90% by abandoning microservices for a monolith in May 2023? Not a cash-strapped startup or an indie project—Amazon itself, for its Prime Video service. The same AWS that earns billions every year by selling microservices infrastructure admitted that, sometimes, a good old monolith wins. This reversal from the company that practically wrote the playbook on distributed systems sent shockwaves through the cloud-native community. Amazon later removed the original blog post, but the internet never forgets, as you’ll see later. I’ve been speaking up against unnecessary or premature use of microservices architecture for five, six years now. After Amazon Prime Video went back to a monolith, I came across several eminent architects who are also speaking against microservices as default. And yet in most tech circles, microservices are still viewed as the only way to build modern software. They dominate conferences, blogs, and job listings. Teams adopt them not because their requirements justify it, but because it feels like the obvious (and résumé-boosting) choice. “Cloud-native” has become synonymous with “microservices-by-default”, as if other approaches are as obsolete as floppy disks. Microservices do solve real problems, but at a massive scale. Most teams don’t actually operate at that scale. With this article, I urge you to reflect on the question the industry has mostly stopped asking: Should microservices be the default choice for building at scale? We’ll look at reversal stories and insights from seasoned architects, and weigh the trade-offs and alternatives. After considering all of this, you can decide whether your problem really needs a constellation of microservices. Microservices: The Agility-Complexity Trade-Off On paper, microservices look impressive. Instead of one big monolith, you split your application into many small services. Each one can be written in any language, owned by a small team, and deployed on its own schedule. If you need more capacity, you can scale only the part that’s under load. The promise is elegant: independent deployability, autonomous teams, multi-language stacks, and elastic scaling. But the catch is that every split creates a seam, and every seam is a potential failure point. Inside a monolith, function calls are instant and predictable. Across services, those same calls become network requests: slower, failure-prone, sometimes returning inconsistent data. With dozens (or hundreds) of services, you need version management, schema evolution, distributed transactions, tracing, centralized logging, and heavy-duty CI/CD pipelines just to keep things running. This Gartner diagram captures the trade-off perfectly: microservices exchange the simplicity of one codebase for the complexity of many. At a massive scale (think Netflix), that trade-off may be worth it. But when operational benefits don’t outweigh the costs, teams end up paying a steep price in debugging, coordination, and glue code just to hold their product together. Microservices make sense in very specific scenarios where distinct business capabilities need independent scaling and deployment. For example, payment processing (security-critical, rarely updated) differs fundamentally from recommendation engine (memory-intensive, constantly A/B tested). These components have different scaling patterns, deployment cycles, and risk profiles, which justify separate services. The success of microservices hinges on clear business domain boundaries that match your team structure, as Conway’s Law predicts. If your organization naturally splits into autonomous teams that own distinct capabilities, microservices might work. (So, most “one-and-a-half pizza” startups don’t qualify, do they?) That’s why microservices work effectively for companies like Amazon and Uber—although not always. In fact, most organizations lack the prerequisites: dedicated service ownership, mature CI/CD, robust monitoring, and crucially, scale that justifies the operational overhead. Startups that adapt microservices prematurely often regret their decision. So ask yourself: Are you using microservices to solve an independent scaling problem, or are you inviting more complexity than your solution needs? The Great Microservices Reversal Ironically, even though tech giants are the ones that are most likely to benefit from microservices, many of these very same companies are walking back their microservices architectures, and the results are eye-opening. Amazon Prime Video: 90% Cost Reduction with a Monolith In May 2023, Amazon engineers admitted the unthinkable: Prime Video had abandoned microservices for a monolith. Their Video Quality Analysis (VQA) team had built what looked like a textbook distributed system: AWS Step Functions and Lambda monitored thousands of video streams through independent, scalable components. On paper, it was serverless perfection. In practice, it was a disaster. “We realized that distributed approach wasn’t bringing a lot of benefits in our specific use case,” said Marcin Kolny in the now-archived Prime Video Engineering blog. Their “infinitely scalable” system crumbled at just 5% of expected load due to orchestration overhead. The fix was embarrassingly simple: collapse everything into a single process. It resulted in 90% lower costs and faster performance. Twilio Segment: From 140 Services to One Fast Monolith Back in 2018, Twilio Segment, a customer data platform, documented a similar reversal in their brutally honest post “Goodbye Microservices”. Their system had sprawled into 140+ services, creating operational chaos. At one point, three full-time engineers spent most of their time firefighting instead of building. As they admitted, “Instead of enabling us to move faster, the small team found themselves mired in exploding complexity. Essential benefits of this architecture became burdens. As our velocity plummeted, our defect rate exploded.” Their solution was radical but effective: collapse all 140+ services into a single monolith. The impact was immediate. Test suites that once took an hour now finished in milliseconds. Developer productivity soared: they shipped 46 improvements to shared libraries in a year, up from 32 in the microservices era. Shopify: Sanity over Hype Shopify runs one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in the world (2.8M+ lines). Instead of chasing microservices, they deliberately chose a modular monolith: a single codebase with clear component boundaries. Shopify’s engineers concluded that “microservices would bring their own set of challenges”, so they chose modularity without the operational overhead. All these examples beg the question: If even the pioneers of microservices are retreating, why are we still treating it as gospel? Expert Voices against Microservices Mania Some of the most respected voices in software architecture—people behind many of the systems we all admire—are also cautioning against microservices and repeating mistakes they’ve seen play out at scale. (After all, cheerleaders don’t play the game; cloud DevRels rarely build at scale.) Rails Creator: Simplicity over Sophistication David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails, has long advocated simplicity over architectural trends. His analysis of the Amazon Prime Video reversal puts it bluntly: “The real-world results of all this theory are finally in, and it’s clear that in practice, microservices pose perhaps the biggest siren song for needlessly complicating your system.” DHH’s image of a siren song is apt: microservices promise elegance but leave teams wrecked on the rocks of complexity. Microservices: Mistake of The Decade? Jason Warner, former CTO of GitHub, doesn’t mince words while commenting on microservices: “I’m convinced that one of the biggest architectural mistakes of the past decade was going full microservice.” Warner understands scale: GitHub runs at internet scale, and he’s led engineering at Heroku and Canonical. His critique cuts deeper because it’s lived experience, beyond theoretical advice: “90% of all companies in the world could probably just be a monolith running against a primary db cluster with db backups, some caches and proxies and be done with it.” GraphQL Co-Creator: “Don’t” Then there’s Nick Schrock, co-creator of GraphQL. If anyone had a reason to cheer for distributed systems, it’d be him. Instead, he says: “Microservices are such a fundamentally and catastrophically bad idea that there are going to be an entire cohort of multi-billion companies built that do nothing but contain the damage that they have wrought.” He goes on to describe microservices as organizational gambles: “[Y]ou end up with these services that you have to maintain forever that match the org structure and the product requirements from five years ago. Today, they don’t make a lot of sense.” The person who literally built tools to fix distributed system pain says don’t distribute unless you must, maybe it’s time to listen. Other Voices Questioning Microservice Maximalism Other engineering leaders are also reconsidering microservice maximalism. At Uber, Gergely Orosz admitted: “We’re moving many of our microservices to macroservices (well-sized services). Exactly b/c testing and maintaining thousands of microservices is not only hard – it can cause more trouble long-term than it solves the short-term.” Uber still runs microservices where they’re justified, but they’re choosing their battles. Kelsey Hightower, known for his work with Kubernetes and Google Cloud, cut through the microservices hype with CS101: “I’m willing to wager a monolith will outperform every microservice architecture. Just do the math on the network latency between each service and the amount of serialization and deserialization of each request.” He subsequently deleted this tweet, but the network math still grades microservices. When pioneers like these, including those who actually solved distributed systems at scale, start waving red flags, it’s worth taking note. My question here is: If GitHub’s CTO thinks 90% of companies don’t need microservices, are you sure yours is part of the 10%? The Hidden Costs of Microservices Microservices demand such caution because of these hidden costs that teams often underestimate. Operational Costs A monolith is simple: in-process function calls. Microservices replace that with networks. Every request now travels across machines, through load balancers, service meshes, and authentication layers, creating more failure points and infrastructure needs. You suddenly need service discovery (how services find each other), distributed tracing (tracking requests across services), centralized logging (aggregating logs from multiple services), and monitoring systems that understand service topology. Each of these is necessary, but together they’re complex and expensive. Duplicated data requires extra storage. Constant service-to-service calls rack up network egress fees. Cloud costs scale faster than the apps they host. Prime Video’s workflow spent more on orchestrating S3 data transfers between services than on actual processing. Developer Productivity Drain In microservices, the hard part isn’t writing code; it’s navigating distributed system interactions. In “The macro problem with microservices“, Stack Overflow identifies a critical productivity drain: distributed state forces developers to write defensive code that constantly checks for partial failures. In a monolith, a developer can follow a code path end-to-end within one repo. In microservices, one feature might span four or five repos with different dependencies and deploy cycles. Adding a single field triggers weeks of coordination: you need to update one service, then wait for consumers to adopt, version your APIs, manage rollouts, and so on. Different teams will also typically maintain different microservices using different tech stacks, so there’s a risk that they unintentionally break something as well. Breaking changes that a compiler would catch in a monolith now surface as runtime errors in production. Testing and Deployment Complexity Monolith integration and end-to-end tests are faster because they run locally, in memory. Distributed systems don’t allow that luxury: real confidence requires integration and end-to-end tests across numerous service boundaries. So these tests are slower, more brittle, and require staging environments that resemble production, all of which effectively double infrastructure costs and slow feedback loops. Many teams discover this only after their test suite becomes a bottleneck. Deployment orchestration adds another layer. Rolling updates across interdependent services require careful sequencing to avoid breaking contracts. Version incompatibility disturbs frequently: Service A works with Service B v2.1 but breaks with v2.2. Failed deployments leave systems partially updated and difficult to recover. Data Management and Consistency The most underestimated complexity of microservices lies in data consistency across service boundaries. Monoliths benefit from ACID transactions: operations complete entirely or fail entirely. Microservices split that across services, forcing you to build distributed saga (multi-step workflows with rollback logic), live with eventual consistency (data only becomes correct after a delay), or write compensation logic (extra code to undo partial failures). What was once a single database transaction now spans network hops, retries, and partial failures. Debugging inconsistent orders or payments gets much harder when state is duplicated across services. As research confirms, data duplication, correctness challenges, and transactional complexity are the top pain points in microservice systems. The Compounding Effect These complexities multiply. Operational overhead makes debugging harder, which slows testing, which makes deployments riskier, which creates more incidents. Microservices don’t just shift complexity from code to operations; they tax every part of your engineering process. Unless your scale demands it, that tax often outweighs the benefits. Think about it: If every network hop adds complexity and cost, does your use case really justify the price? Beyond Microservices: Smarter Architectural Alternatives Before defaulting to microservices, it’s worth considering how simpler, well-structured architectures can deliver comparable scalability without the distributed complexity tax. Two noteworthy alternatives are modular monoliths and service-oriented architectures. Modular Monoliths: Structure without Distribution Unlike traditional monoliths that become tangled messes, modular monoliths enforce strict internal boundaries through clear module APIs and disciplined separation. Each module exposes well-defined interfaces, enabling teams to work independently while deploying a single, coherent system. As Kent Beck explains in “Monolith -> Services: Theory & Practice”, modular monoliths manage coupling through organizational discipline rather than distributed networks. The key difference: modules still communicate via explicit contracts like microservices, but they use fast, reliable function calls instead of HTTP requests that are vulnerable to network latency and partial failures. Why does it work? Simpler operations: microservices-level organization with monolithic simplicity Stronger consistency: full ACID transactions Easier debugging: one traceable system, no hunting for bugs in the ELK haystack Better performance: function calls beat network hops Here’s some real-world proof: Shopify’s 2.8 million-line codebase handles 30TB per minute with separate teams owning distinct modules, yet everything deploys together. Facebook runs similarly. (And principal architect Keith Adams jokes that if you want to be talked out of microservices, he’s your guy.) With recent developments in frameworks like Spring Modulith, Django, Laravel, and Rails (as seen at scale with Shopify), modular monoliths are poised to gain wider traction in the years ahead. Service-Oriented Architecture: The Middle Ground Service-oriented architecture (SOA) sits between monoliths and microservices, favoring larger, domain-driven services instead of dozens or hundreds of tiny ones. These services often communicate via an enterprise service bus (ESB), which reduces orchestration overhead while preserving separation of concerns. Instead of splitting authentication, user preferences, and notifications into separate microservices, SOA might combine them into a single “User Service”, simplifying coordination while preserving autonomy and targeted scaling. SOA provides enterprise-grade modularity without ultra-fine-grained distribution overhead. Here’s why it works: Right-sized boundaries: fewer, domain-aligned services instead of sprawl Targeted scalability: scale services tied to real business domains Pragmatic complexity: avoids ultra-fine-grained overhead while retaining modular reasoning SOA has also been proven to work at scale. Norwegian Air Shuttle, Europe’s 9th-largest airline, used SOA to boost agility across complex flight operations. Credit Suisse’s SOA rollout powered millions of service calls per day back in the early 2000s. Choosing Wisely: Fit over Hype The problem you’re solving should justify your architecture. I often use this analogy in consulting: You don’t need a sword to cut a lemon—a knife suffices. And as timeless wisdom reminds us, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. In all likelihood, you’re not Google (you don’t need Google-level fault tolerance), or Amazon (you don’t need massive write availability), or LinkedIn (you don’t handle billions of events a day). Most applications don’t operate at that scale, demanding fundamentally different solutions than ultra-distributed architectures. For most systems, well-structured modular monoliths (for most common applications, including startups) or SOA (enterprises) deliver comparable scalability and resilience as microservices, without the distributed complexity tax. Alternatively, you may also consider well-sized services (macroservices, or what Gartner proposed as miniservices) instead of tons of microservices. It’s worth asking: If simpler architectures can deliver comparable scalability, why are you choosing the complexity of microservices? Docker: Built for Any Architecture Docker isn’t just for microservices—it works great across all kinds of architectures like monoliths, SOA, APIs, and event-driven systems. The real benefit is that Docker gives you consistent performance, easier deployment, and flexibility to scale up your apps no matter what architectural approach you’re using. Docker packages applications cleanly, keeps environments consistent from laptop to production, simplifies dependency management, and isolates applications from the host system. A Dockerized monolith offers all these benefits, minus the orchestration overhead of microservices. Microsoft’s guidance on containerizing monoliths clarifies that scaling containers is “far faster and easier than deploying additional VMs”, whether you run one service or fifty. Twilio Segment observed that containerized monoliths can “horizontally scale your environment easily by spinning up more containers and shutting them down when demand subsides.” For many applications, scaling the whole app is exactly what’s needed. As for DevOps, a monolith in Docker is lighter to operate than a full-blown microservices setup. Logging aggregation becomes simpler when you’re collecting from identical containers rather than disparate services with different formats. Monitoring and debugging remain centralized, and troubleshooting avoids tracing requests across service boundaries. So, it’s definitely worth considering: Even without the complexity of microservices, Docker gives you the same advantages — clean deployments, easy scaling, and consistent environments. So why not keep it? Wrapping Up A few years ago, my then-8-year-old wanted a bicycle. He’d mostly ride around our apartment complex, maybe venture into the nearby lane. He didn’t need 21 gears, but those shiny shifters had him smitten—imagine riding faster by changing those gears! He absolutely wanted that mechanically complex beauty. (It’s hard to argue with a starry-eyed kid… or a founder :P). Once he started riding the new bike, the gears slipped, the chain jammed, and the bicycle spent more time broken than on the road. Eventually, we had to dump it. I wasn’t able to convince him back then that a simpler bicycle could’ve served him better, but maybe this article will convince a few grown-ups making architectural decisions. We techies love indulging in complex systems. (Check: were you already thinking, What’s complex about bicycles with gears??) But the more moving parts you add, the more often they break. Complexity often creates more problems than it solves. The point I’m making isn’t to dump microservices entirely—it’s to pick an architecture that fits your actual needs, not what the cloud giant is pushing (while quietly rolling back their own commit). Most likely, modular monoliths or well-designed SOA will serve your needs better and make your team more productive. So here’s the million-dollar question: Will you design for cloud-native hype or for your own business requirements? Do you really need microservices? View the full article

As IT environments become increasingly distributed and organizations adopt hybrid and remote work at scale, traditional perimeter-based security models and on-premises Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions no longer suffice. IT administrators, contractors and third-party vendors now require secure access to critical systems from any location and on any device, without compromisingView the full article

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a cross-tenant blind spot that allows attackers to bypass Microsoft Defender for Office 365 protections via the guest access feature in Teams. "When users operate as guests in another tenant, their protections are determined entirely by that hosting environment, not by their home organization," Ontinue security researcher Rhys Downing said in a reportView the full article

A brass plaque has been laid in honour of a Church of Scotland school matron who died in Auschwitz during the Second World War.View the full article

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan — named after the Jordan River and ruled by pro-Western King Abdullah II — is organizing a major global celebration marking the 2,000th anniversary of Christ’s baptism.View the full article

The benefits cap may have been a factor in some women's decisions to have an abortion.View the full article

A report by the European Centre for Law and Justice View the full article

The threat actor known as Bloody Wolf has been attributed to a cyber attack campaign that has targeted Kyrgyzstan since at least June 2025 with the goal of delivering NetSupport RAT. As of October 2025, the activity has expanded to also single out Uzbekistan, Group-IB researchers Amirbek Kurbanov and Volen Kayo said in a report published in collaboration with Ukuk, a state enterprise under theView the full article