The question isn't which is better
Microservices aren't an upgrade from monoliths — they're a different set of tradeoffs. A monolith gets you simpler deployment, easier local development, and straightforward transactions. A microservices architecture gets you independent scaling and independent deployment at the cost of network calls, distributed data consistency, and a much bigger operational surface.
The right question isn't "which architecture is more modern," it's "which set of tradeoffs matches where this team and this product are right now."
Signals it's time to split
- Deploy contention: Multiple teams are blocked waiting on the same release train, and unrelated changes keep breaking each other.
- Divergent scaling needs: One part of the system needs 10x the compute of the rest, and scaling the whole monolith to match is wasteful.
- Team topology mismatch: Your org chart has outgrown a single shared codebase, and ownership boundaries are unclear or constantly contested.
“Migrate along the seams your team already argues about — those are your real service boundaries.”
How we run the migration
We favor the strangler-fig approach: carve out one well-bounded capability at a time behind a stable interface, prove it in production, then move to the next. Rewriting everything at once is where these migrations go over budget and over schedule — incremental extraction keeps the system shippable throughout.