The Microservices Promise vs. Reality Every architecture diagram looks clean before it meets real traffic. Microservices on Azure promise independent deployability, team autonomy, granular scaling, and fault isolation. Those benefits are real — but they come with a cost that's rarely discussed honestly in tutorials: operational complexity that scales faster than your team does if you're not careful. This post isn't a beginner's introduction to microservices. It's an honest account of what we've learned building and running microservice architectures on Azure across multiple production systems — what the platform does well, where you'll get burned, and the specific patterns that separate systems that hold up from systems that fall apart at 3am. Why Azure for Microservices? Before getting into the patterns, it's worth being clear about why Azure is a reasonable choice for microservice workloads — and what you're actually signing up for.…