The False Dichotomy
Most teams treat this as binary: microservices OR monolith. The reality is a spectrum, and the modular monolith sits in the sweet spot for most teams.
Monolith Strengths
- Simple deployment — one artifact
- No network latency between modules
- Easy local development
- Straightforward transactions
Microservices Strengths
- Independent scaling per service
- Independent deployments
- Technology diversity
- Team autonomy at scale
💡
The modular monolith gives you clean boundaries without distributed system complexity. Start here and extract services only when you have a measurable reason.
Decision Framework
Team < 20 devs? Start modular monolith. Hitting real scaling pain on a specific domain? Extract that one service. Don't pre-optimise.