What are the benefits and challenges of microservices architecture?

Benefits: independent deployment, technology flexibility per service, team autonomy, fault isolation, scalability per service. Challenges: distributed system complexity, network latency, data consistency across services, operational overhead (deployment, monitoring), service discovery, debugging distributed transactions. Microservices require: mature DevOps practices, observability stack, clear service boundaries. Start with monolith if domain unclear. Microservices solve organizational scaling as much as technical.