The Death of the Monolith: Why Microservices Aren't Always the Answer

The Premature Optimization Trap

In the last decade, "microservices" became a synonym for "modern architecture." If you weren't breaking your application into dozens of independently deployable services, you were building a dinosaur. But as the dust settles, many engineering teams are waking up to a harsh reality: distributed systems are hard.

The complexity tax of microservices—network latency, eventual consistency, distributed tracing, and infrastructure overhead—often outweighs the benefits for small to medium-sized teams.

When to Stick with a Monolith

A Modular Monolith is often the sweet spot. By enforcing strict module boundaries within a single codebase, you get the benefits of separation of concerns without the operational nightmare of orchestration.

• Speed of Development: Refactoring across boundaries is a simple IDE operation, not a coordinated multi-repo migration.
• Simplified Deployment: One pipeline, one artifact, one atomic release.
• Performance: In-process calls are orders of magnitude faster than network hops.

The "Break Glass" Moment

Microservices solve organizational problems more than technical ones. When you have dozens of teams, radically different scaling needs, or regulatory isolation requirements—then it makes sense.

Until then? Keep it boring. Keep it simple.