Good question. The scope of each service is less about scale (because we can generally run as many instances as needed) but rather about the shape and complexity of the overall system and flow.

For example, it's reasonable to implement three independent aspects as three separate services. Or to implement a two-phase system as two services. There is nothing wrong with small-scope services, per se, from a correctness point of view (although operational overhead is another matter). However, the microservice approach gets into trouble when it breaks up tightly-coupled functionality into multiple services -- and then the failure modes pile up.

In my experience, team structure or existing unmergeable codebases sometimes make the problems with such a service division the lesser evil. But it's not ideal.

Henning Rohde - Interesting!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The books that I read so far generally take small scoped services as an example, hence I tend to think of smaller services always. Probably, I need to change that mindset.