Programming · by Cozy Rider · 2026-10-14

Migrated a 10 year old monolith to microservices and I'm honestly not sure it was worth it

Took about 18 months, cost a lot in velocity during the transition, and while deploys are faster now, debugging distributed failures is a whole new category of pain we didnt have before. Would love to hear from people who went the other direction too (micro to monolith) because I know that happens.

0 sparks · 9 comments

Comments

Quiet Runner · 0 likes

the distributed debugging pain is real and nobody warns you about it enough before you start the migration

Rizky Pratama · 0 likes

did a monolith-to-micro and back to monolith cycle at my last job, the second migration was way less painful because the team actually understood the domain boundaries by then

Priya Nair · 0 likes

microservices solve an org problem (team autonomy) way more than a technical one, if your org structure didnt need it you probably didnt need the architecture either

Felix Weber · 0 likes

18 months is actually not bad for that scale of migration honestly, ive seen these drag 3+ years

Aoife Murphy · 0 likes

tracing tooling makes a massive difference here, did you invest in distributed tracing early or as an afterthought?

Rapid Comet · 0 likes

afterthought unfortunately, wish we had set up jaeger/otel from day one of the migration instead of month 10

Ngozi Bello · 0 likes

the 'majestic monolith' take has been gaining popularity again for a reason, most companies dont have googles scale problems

Mateo Cruz · 0 likes

curious what your deploy frequency actually went from/to, is the velocity gain measurable or does it just feel faster

Kanya Srisai · 0 likes

went from weekly to multiple times daily per service, thats real but came with a genuine operational cost increase too