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Should we decompose our monolith?
From their first introduction in 2005, the debate between adopting a microservices architecture, a monolithic service architecture, or a hybrid between the two, has become one of the least-reversible decisions that most engineering organizations make. Even migrating to a different database technology is generally a less expensive change than moving from monolith to microservices or from microservices to monolith. The industry has in many ways gone full circle on that debate, from most hyperscalers in the 2010s partaking in a multi-year monolith to microservices migration, to Kelsey Hightower’s iconic tweet on the perils of distributed monoliths:
The business is profitable, but revenue growth has been 10-20% YoY, creating persistent pressure on spend from our board, based on mild underperformance relative to public market comparables. We’ve previously attempted to decompose, and have a number of lingering partial migrations that don’t align cleanly with our current business unit ownership structure. Properly tuned, service-oriented architectures ought to be cost competitive, and potentially superior in complex workloads, but it’s hard to maintain the required investment in infrastructure teams when in a cost-cutting environment.
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