The topic of this episode is microservices, addressing questions like what is a microservices architecture, best use cases for microservices, how to monitor them, trade-off between flexibility and complexity, and cultural implications of microservices. The guests are Richard Rodger, CEO of VoxGig, and Sean Carpenter, Principal Technical Evangelist at New Relic. They discuss the importance of understanding business logic, identifying sharable components, and isolating complexity in edge cases. Microservices primarily provide flexibility without complexity, but complexity is unavoidable. The key to success lies in having a clear definition of microservices, a strong separation of concerns, and isolating complexity into separate services that can handle the really ugly, messy stuff. Monitoring is critical for understanding system complexity, and distributed tracing plays a central role in this process. Microservices have a significant cultural impact, enabling remote working, diversity, and empowering individual teams to make decisions without needing permission from higher-ups. An acceptable error rate is also crucial for achieving velocity and making business decisions about risk tolerance.