Every engineering leader eventually asks the same question: should we break up the monolith? The honest answer is that microservices solve organizational scaling problems more often than they solve technical ones, and the operational cost of distributed systems is real and ongoing.
We evaluate three factors before recommending decomposition: team topology, deployment coupling, and data ownership clarity. If a single team can own a monolith end-to-end and deploy it safely, decomposition often adds cost without adding value.
When we do recommend microservices, we insist on domain-driven service boundaries — not a service per database table, and not a service per REST endpoint. Boundaries should map to real business capabilities that different teams own independently.
The pattern that works best in practice is the strangler fig: incrementally extracting services from the monolith behind stable contracts, rather than a risky big-bang rewrite. This lets you validate the new architecture in production before fully committing.