Microservices vs Monolith: Choose Boring on Purpose
Most teams reach for microservices too early. Here's how to tell when the split is worth the cost.
Microservices solve organizational and scaling problems you may not have yet. Adopt them to fix a real pain, not to feel modern.
Start with a modular monolith
A well-structured monolith with clear internal boundaries ships faster and is far easier to operate. You can extract a service later when one genuinely needs to scale or deploy independently.
The real cost of distribution
Every network hop adds latency, failure modes, and observability burden. Distributed transactions are hard; distributed debugging is harder. Pay that cost only when the benefit is concrete.
A simple test
If two teams keep blocking each other on the same deploy, or one component needs radically different scaling, split it. Otherwise, keep it together.
