Running E2E blackbox test is equally simple for all kinds of architectures, especially today, when it's so easy to create a clean test environment with multiple containers even on developer's machine. It may be harder to automate this process for a distributed system, but, frankly speaking, I don't see a big difference between a docker-compose file or a launch script for monolith - I've been writing such tests for distributed systems casually for several years and from my personal experience it's much easier to process the test output and debug the microservices than monolithic applications.
> it's much easier to process the test output and debug the microservices than monolithic applications.
You easier to debug end-to-end tests of a microservice architecture that monolith? That's not my experience. How do you manage to put side by side all the events when they are in dozen of files?
Using only files for logging is the last thing I would do in 2018.
I use Serilog for structured logging. Depending on the log destination, your logs are either stored in an RDMS (I wouldn’t recommend it) or created as JSON with name value pairs that can be sent directly to a JSON data store like ElasticSearch or Mongo where you can do adhoc queries.
I just don't use files for anything (services should be designed with the assumption that container can be destroyed any time, so files are simply not an option here). If you are talking about the logs, there are solutions like Graylog to aggregate and analyze them.
Easy until you have 100,000 of them anyway, in which case it's expensive and slow to run it for every dev. (At that point you have enough devs that microservices 100% make sense, though)
