I prefer that the advice not to be dogmatic about saying “no” but rather to be wary of the costs. The big benefit of microservices is being able to easily reason about or scale services, but adding dependencies usually sacrifices those benefits. I’ve seen that done poorly in the various iterations of this cycle and the worst failure modes mean that debugging requires you to understand how to get & interpret state from many locations, making even simple problems challenging.
That might mean that you still take that cost willingly but engineer in the extra tooling to make things easier to manage – i.e. simplifying tracing load or errors across service boundaries back to the source – but it might also be a cue for you raise to reconsider whether the service divisions are in the right place or whether all of the services are appropriately sized. If you find yourself needed distributed transactions, retries, etc. that’s often a good time to pause and reconsider.
That might mean that you still take that cost willingly but engineer in the extra tooling to make things easier to manage – i.e. simplifying tracing load or errors across service boundaries back to the source – but it might also be a cue for you raise to reconsider whether the service divisions are in the right place or whether all of the services are appropriately sized. If you find yourself needed distributed transactions, retries, etc. that’s often a good time to pause and reconsider.