In my humble opinion microservices are "hot" because in theory you can scale a lot with them if you are able to do cloud provisioning.
Microservices needs DevOps+Orchestration Service.
A good example of microservices architecture is how K8s is designed: I think it is an overkill for most average needs, so think twice before entering in microservice trip tunnel.
Microservices solve pretty much one problem: you have a larger organization (> 10 devs, certainly > 100) and as a result the coordination overhead between those devs and their respective managers and stakeholders is significantly limiting overall forward progress. This will manifest in various concrete ways such as "microservices allow independent component release and deployment cycles" and "microservices allow fine grain scaling", and "microservices allow components written in different languages", but really it's all Conway.
This is a pretty critical point. The drum I tend to beat is that the positive read of microservices is that they make your code reflect your org chart.
(If they don't do this, and that usually resolves into developers each owning a bunch of microservices that are related concepts but distinct and are context-switching all the live-long day, you've created the reverse of a big ball of mud: you've created a tar pit. Companies used to brag to me when they had 250 microservices with 100 developers, and I don't think any of those companies are going concerns.)
i always think of microservices as a product an organization offers to itself. If you don't have the team including managers and even marketing to run an internal product then you probably shouldn't be doing the microservice thing.
Well in my eyes equating microservices with Kubernetes is a problem in of itself. I actually wrote about Docker Swarm as a simpler and more usable alternative to it (for smaller/simpler deployments), though some other folks also enjoy Hashicorp Nomad which is also nice (another article on my blog, won't link here not to be spammy myself).
If you evaluate your circumstances and find that microservices could be good for you, then there are certainly options to do them more easily. In my eyes some of the ideas that have popped up, like 12 Factor Apps https://12factor.net/ can be immensely useful for both microservices and even monoliths.
So i guess it's all very situational and a lot of the effort is finding out what's suitable for your particular circumstances. For example, i made the page over at https://apturicovid.lv/#en When the app was released and the page was getting hundreds of thousands of views due to all of the news coverage, scaling out to something like 8 instances was a really simple and adequate fix to not break under the load.
In my humble opinion microservices are "hot" because in theory you can scale a lot with them if you are able to do cloud provisioning. Microservices needs DevOps+Orchestration Service.
A good example of microservices architecture is how K8s is designed: I think it is an overkill for most average needs, so think twice before entering in microservice trip tunnel.