Series 13 · 10 Parts· 1h 56m

Monolith to Microservices

When to break up a monolith and when not to — service boundaries, decomposing the database, and the distributed-monolith trap.

Start reading · Part 1

Contents

01 Monolith vs Microservices: The Real Trade-Off 11 min read Microservices trade build-time simplicity for run-time complexity. Here is the honest comparison — and why a modular monolith is often the better answer than either.
02 When to Break Up a Monolith (and When Not To) 11 min read The case for microservices is a case about pressure, not age. Here are the symptoms that justify extraction, the ones that don't, and the honest signal to leave the monolith alone.
03 Refactoring vs Rewriting a Monolith 11 min read The clean rewrite is the most seductive and most dangerous plan in modernization. Here is why incremental refactoring almost always wins — and the rare case where a rewrite is honest.
04 How to Migrate a Monolith to Microservices 15 min read The incremental playbook for decomposing a monolith — where to cut first, how the strangler facade holds the seam, and how each service reaches production without a big-bang cutover.
05 Domain-Driven Design for Service Boundaries 11 min read The hardest part of decomposition is deciding where to cut. Domain-driven design and the bounded context give you a principled way to find service boundaries that hold.
06 Decomposing the Database 12 min read Splitting the shared database is the hardest part of any monolith decomposition. Here is how to break data apart along service boundaries without losing consistency — and how to keep it correct with sagas.
07 API Gateways & Service Boundaries 11 min read The API gateway is the front door to a decomposed system and, during migration, the strangler facade itself. Here is what it does, what it shouldn't, and how service contracts keep boundaries stable.
08 The Distributed Monolith Anti-Pattern 11 min read A distributed monolith has all the cost of microservices and none of the independence. Here is how to recognize it, the boundary and data mistakes that cause it, and how to recover.
09 Microservices Migration Risks & Challenges 11 min read Beyond the distributed monolith, a microservices migration carries operational, organizational, and consistency risks. Here is the full landscape and how to de-risk each before it bites.
10 A Monolith-to-Microservices Example, Start to Finish 12 min read A worked, representative example of decomposing a monolith slice by slice — from the pressure that justified it to the services that shipped and the parts left as a monolith on purpose.