The common childish response when Mommy or Daddy is denying the child something. “Everybody is doing it” is apparently supposed to be a good enough reason to do it ourselves. However, children are not the only ones that employ this reasoning.
For example, just because “everybody is doing” microservices doesn’t mean that is a good pattern to apply in your context. Martin Fowler has written at length on how to “do” microservices well, and why they might be a poor choice for many.
Popularity Paradox
Tools and techniques become popular because they solve common problems. Yet sometimes we adopt popular tools even if we do not have the problems they solve. We like to be on the cutting edge. We need the best developers, and the best developers obviously work with No-SQL databases… Who cares if we don’t have the scale Kafka was built for, it’s Kafka!
We of course go looking for the popular tools when we have a problem. Nobody wants to be stuck with a tool that nobody knows how to use or support. We want a large user base that can help answer questions. We want developers that know what we are talking about. However, we can quite often fall into the trap of having a brand new hammer, and everything around us begins to look like a nail.
Feel the Force
Feel the forces that are in the business and in your application. If your existing message broker cannot keep up with the amount of messages you put on it, look for a tool to fix that. If your monolith is becoming too slow and dangerous to work on, start splitting it apart. But don’t go inventing problems that don’t exist. You may find that the nail you think you see, with that shiny new hammer, was actually the one on your thumb.