Microservices architecture is used by Netflix, Amazon, and Uber. This fact has convinced thousands of startup founders and junior architects to immediately apply it to their 5-person startup with 100 users. The result: years of complexity managing service communication, distributed tracing, and deployment orchestration — for problems they don't have.
The Monolith Is Not a Bad Word
A well-structured monolith — with clear module boundaries, clean dependency management, and a solid test suite — is simpler to develop, simpler to debug, simpler to deploy, and orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than a microservices architecture of equivalent functionality.
Basecamp has run on a Rails monolith for 20+ years. Shopify served billions in commerce transactions as a Rails monolith before selectively extracting services. Stack Overflow serves 1.5 billion requests/month on 9 application servers running a monolith.
When Microservices Actually Make Sense
- →Different scaling requirements — one service needs 100× the resources of another
- →Different deployment frequencies — one team needs to deploy 10× per day independently
- →Different technology requirements — one service needs Python for ML, another Go for low latency
- →Organisational boundaries — Conway's Law suggests systems mirror team structures
- →You're already successful at scale — Netflix had a monolith until they needed to scale to millions
💡 Tip
Build a modular monolith first. Design clear module boundaries from day one. Extract services when you have a specific, proven reason to — not because microservices sound impressive.
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Jordan Blake
Senior Full-Stack Engineer at Novacronix
Engineering insights from the Novacronix team — built from real production experience, not documentation.