Why Not Microservices (Yet)

The unpopular opinion

Every new project seems to start with a diagram full of boxes and arrows. I start with one box and a question: "what breaks first?"

What I actually do

1. Build a modular monolith with clear module boundaries.
2. Enforce the boundaries with namespaces, not networks.
3. Extract a service only when one module has different scaling, deployment, or failure needs.

The punchline

I spent two hours debugging a distributed bug once. The bug was a missing semicolon in an env file. I am not proud — but I learned to love boring deploys.