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Meshack Mogire

Microservices vs Monolith: The Honest Truth

“We need microservices because Netflix uses them.” This sentence has killed more startups than bad product-market fit.

The Hidden Cost of Microservices
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You trade complexity of code for complexity of infrastructure.

  1. Network Latency: Function calls are nanoseconds. HTTP calls are milliseconds.
  2. Distributed Transactions: Rollbacks across 3 services are a nightmare (Requires Sagas pattern).
  3. Observability: Debugging a request that jumps through 5 containers requires expensive tracing tools (Jaeger/OpenTelemetry).

The Modular Monolith
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This is the sweet spot for 99% of companies. Keep code in one repo. Deploy as one binary. But enforce strict module boundaries.

# Django Example
/users
/payments
/inventory

If payments imports from inventory, you have a violation. Enforce this via linters, not network boundaries.

When to Split?
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  1. Independent Scaling: Video processing needs 100 GPUs. The user login service needs 1 CPU.
  2. Team Scaling: You have 50 engineers. API collisions in git are slowing you down.