We Ran 100 Microservices on a 16GB Laptop. No Kubernetes.

mynameis — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 13:25:48 +0000

Local development for a handful of services is easy. Local development for
seven business domains and a hundred services is where most setups quietly
give up — port collisions, a docker-compose.yml nobody wants to touch, an
onboarding doc that's already stale by the time a new hire reads it.

We wanted to know how far you could actually push local development before
reaching for a cluster. So we built TDK
(Tilt Development Kit) and benchmarked it against a synthetic but realistic
100-service ERP system.

The model

Every service declares itself in a small manifest:

{
  "appName": "general-ledger-api",
  "domain": "finance",
  "type": "backend",
  "stack": "finance",
  "port": 4010,
  "dependencies": [],
  "healthCheck": { "enabled": true, "path": "/health" }
}

tdk up walks the repo, discovers every service.json, resolves ports and
cross-service dependencies, and generates the Docker, Tilt, environment, and
TypeScript wiring into a .autogenerated/ folder. You can read exactly what
it built — it's not a hidden platform, just plumbing you didn't have to
hand-write.

The benchmark

Using tdk-erp-system — 100
services across Finance, HR, Inventory, Sales, Manufacturing, Supply Chain,
and Analytics — on a 16GB machine (Docker VM at ~7.75GiB):

Services	All healthy after	Total memory	Crashes / OOM
10	8s	161 MiB	0 / 0
50	24s	829 MiB	0 / 0
100	112s	1.6 GiB	0 / 0

The benchmark script and raw JSON results are committed in the repo, not
just quoted in a README — scripts/benchmark/container-scale.ts.

Try it

npm install -g @tdk-landscape/tdk-cli-core
tdk project --yes
tdk resource orders-api --type backend --stack shop
tdk up shop

tdk resource scaffolds a backend or frontend with a Dockerfile, tests, and
its own manifest. tdk up starts the whole stack, or just one part of it
(tdk up shop), with hot reload on file changes.

If you want to see it on something concrete before your own repo, there's a
SaaS starter with a working checkout flow
and a restaurant-ops example.

It's MIT licensed. We'd genuinely like to know where it breaks for you —
issues and good-first-issues are open.

⭐ If this is useful, a star on tdk-cli-core helps more than you'd think — it's how the next person finds it.

DEV Community: mynameis

We Ran 100 Microservices on a 16GB Laptop. No Kubernetes.

The model

The benchmark

Try it