TL;DR: It is about tech. But that is what they need you to believe.
Monolith vs microservices is a management and culture choice. Microservices were designed to segment management bottlenecks in big corporations.
Yes, you get the performance. But the real gain shows up when you have many teams under your belt.
Understanding monolithic architecture
Imagine building a house where every component — plumbing to electricity — is interconnected. A monolithic architecture operates similarly.
It is like building a house that does not depend on a room across the street.
Benefits of adopting a monolithic architecture:
- Simplified development and deployment: with everything housed in a single platform, deployment becomes straightforward.
- Ease of management for smaller teams: less complexity in understanding the codebase as every member deals with the same unified structure.
- Lower initial costs: monolithic systems generally require less investment to set up and maintain — ideal for startups and small businesses.
If your development team is expected to remain between three and six members over the next few years, going monolithic might be your best approach.
Understanding microservices architecture
Conversely, microservices architecture divides the application into small, loosely coupled services. Each service handles a specific business function and operates independently.
Engineers often claim the architecture was designed for performance, but in reality it was designed to allow multiple teams to work independently on different parts of the project while reducing management costs and approvals.
Hosting platforms love this trend since it has become an excuse to repackage servers under different names to increase the number of offerings they can sell to engineering teams.
Perks of opting for microservices:
- Enhanced scalability: scale specific parts of your service without affecting others.
- Specialized database optimization: each microservice can be optimized for different scenarios, potentially leading to better performance.
- Independent deployment: issues in one service do not necessarily cripple the entire application, facilitating fault isolation and quicker troubleshooting.
Cultural implications and Conway’s Law
An often-overlooked aspect of choosing the right software architecture is cultural fit.
Conway’s Law suggests that software designs are reflected and constrained by the communication structures of the organizations creating them.
Distributed systems exist because at a certain scale and complexity, you have to grow the workforce. But that has the insidious cost of communication between teams. If not budgeted, it becomes chaos — and microservices break that cycle.
Monolithic architecture — better suited to a smaller, more collaborative team:
Microservices architecture — larger organization with multiple, autonomous units:
Making the right choice for your business
It is not just a technical choice. It is also operational and cultural.
The golden question:
Will you be able to feed your engineering department with one New York-style pizza at lunch?
Then go monolithic. Performance can always be improved. Culture is harder.
When microservices kick you back
Imagine you are working in Service B.
Service B reads data from Service A, D, G, P, and K. Additionally, Service B is used by 4 other services.
Visual representation.
You are on-call that day, and there is a bug in your system.
It turns out that a call to P is not working because G is failing.
Now, you have 4 angry teams coming at you, but you cannot fix G because it is not your team’s responsibility.
Half of Team G is on holiday (yes, the team that owns Service G), and you end up reading code you do not know.
Visual representation of how the human factor can blow up a system.
Can you imagine fixing your favorite restaurant’s oven just because you cannot eat?
This is the type of issue that really arises in microservices architectures.
Conclusion
The decision between a monolithic or microservices architecture should not be taken lightly.
If you are reading this and trying to understand the difference, there is a probability that you are starting a project.
Send me an email to chat about your project. Maybe you just need to delegate part of your business logic to a provider and you can make your project efficient.
Sometimes creating a simple POC can help start conversations with customers to study their reaction to the solution.
I believe every amazing product stems from great conversation, and starting those should not be delayed.
Delivering a simple MVP shouldn’t put you in debt or take half a year.
Technical co-founder specialized in SaaS, DevOps, AI agents, and data platforms. Building and scaling with Ruby on Rails, n8n, and fast feedback loops.
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