Microservices Without the Madness - Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Monolith

The Microservices Cargo Cult

"Split it into microservices!" is the modern software equivalent of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It’s a knee-jerk reaction. A dogma. A badge of architectural maturity.

Except it’s often wrong.

Microservices can be powerful. But they are not magic. They don’t make bad systems good, or small teams scale. And if you suggest sticking with a monolith? Prepare to be side-eyed into oblivion.

I’ve watched teams dismantle perfectly functional monoliths and rebuild them into distributed systems that became slower, harder to debug, and impossible to maintain.

Here’s what they, and we, keep getting wrong.

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The Uncomfortable Truth

Microservices solve organizational problems. Not technical ones.

The real benefit isn’t performance or scalability. It’s that multiple teams can move independently without stepping on each other. That’s it.

If you have a team of four? You don’t need microservices. You need boundaries and maybe a weekend off.

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What Microservices Give You (and What They Take)

Pros:

• Independent Deployment: Great when multiple teams need to ship without waiting on each other.
• Tech Diversity: Cool in theory, but hiring just got messier.
• Fault Isolation: One failure doesn’t always tank the whole system. (But it can.)
• Team Autonomy: Teams own their services end-to-end. Works best with mature teams.

Cons:

• Operational Complexity: Tracing, discovery, circuit breakers, retries, load balancing... All must-haves in production.
• Data Consistency: Say goodbye to ACID. Say hello to eventual consistency, sagas, and regret.
• Network Calls Everywhere: Every function call is now a potential timeout.
• Testing Is Pain:nIntegration tests span multiple services. Flaky and slow.

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When Monoliths Make More Sense

Monoliths get a bad rap. But "monolith" doesn’t mean "garbage fire." It just means one deployable unit. It can still be clean. Modular. Fast. Safe.

You should probably start there.

Use a Monolith If:

• Your team is small (under 10 devs).
• You need to iterate quickly.
• You don’t fully understand your domain boundaries yet.
• You need strong consistency.

"Domain boundaries" = where your business naturally splits. User management is separate from order processing, which is separate from inventory. If changes to user profiles often require changes to checkout logic, your boundaries aren’t clear yet.

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Build a Modular Monolith First

Structure your monolith like it’s already split into services:

src/
├── user-management/
│   ├── api/
│   ├── domain/
│   └── infrastructure/
├── order-processing/
│   ├── api/
│   ├── domain/
│   └── infrastructure/
└── shared/
    └── common/

Clear boundaries. Clear ownership. One deploy.

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When Microservices Are Actually the Right Call

• You’re dealing with team scaling issues: Merge conflicts and deployment bottlenecks are everywhere.
• Parts of your system need to scale independently: And they actually do.
• You have regulatory constraints: Isolating sensitive data makes architectural sense.
• Different tech stacks are necessary: Not just trendy.

Example: Shopify’s checkout service handles 10,000x more traffic than their admin dashboard, needs different caching strategies, and gets deployed 20x more often. That’s a natural extraction point.

Or: If your search functionality uses Elasticsearch, but the rest of your stack runs on Postgres—and search traffic spikes during promotions—that's a solid case for separate infrastructure.

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How to Migrate Without Burning It All Down

Start with the Strangler Fig pattern. Wrap the monolith. Peel off services slowly.

Your order of operations:

1. Extract by business capability, not by technical layer.
2. Do one at a time. No parallel heroics.
3. Prep first: You’ll need discovery, logging, tracing, monitoring, alerting, deploy automation.

If you can’t do that? You’re not ready.

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Avoid These Anti-Patterns

• Distributed Monolith: Everything calls everything else. Congrats, now it’s just a slower monolith.
• Nano-Services: CRUD wrappers aren’t services. They’re overhead.
• Shared Databases: If services share a DB, they’re not services.
• Synchronized Releases: If you’re coordinating deployments across services, what even was the point?

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Reality Check Before You Break Things Apart

Ask yourself:

• Do we have multiple teams stepping on each other?
• Are we solving real scale issues, or just anticipating them?
• Do we have ops maturity to support distributed systems?
• Are our domain boundaries stable?

If the answer is no? Stay monolithic. Stay modular. Move fast.

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Final Thought

Microservices aren’t a destination. They’re a tradeoff.

Most of the time, the best architecture isn’t exciting. It’s boring. Understandable. Predictable. Which is exactly what you want when you're trying to build something that lasts.

Build boring on purpose. That’s where the magic hides.