Programming · by Cian Kelly · 2026-10-15
We killed our microservices and went back to a monolith. Deploy time dropped from 40 min to 90 sec.
Three years ago we split a ~15 person team's app into 11 services because that's what the blog posts said to do. Cross-service debugging became a nightmare, every feature touched 3-4 repos, and our on-call rotation was miserable. We spent the last two months merging everything back into a modular monolith with clear internal boundaries. Deploys went from 40 minutes of orchestration hell to 90 seconds. Not saying microservices are bad, just that we adopted them for a team size that didn't need them.
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Comments
Ngozi Bello · 0 likes
this is the most common 'we over engineered for FAANG scale when we had 15 engineers' story and i love seeing it posted honestly
Finn Brown · 0 likes
modular monolith is underrated, you get most of the boundary discipline without the network hop tax
Wanjiku Mwangi · 0 likes
exactly, you can always split out the one service that actually needs independent scaling later, no need to split everything upfront
Wei Lim · 0 likes
curious how you handled the database, did you also consolidate schemas or keep them logically separate within the monolith
Hugo Martin · 0 likes
90 seconds deploy time sounds amazing ngl, we are at 25 minutes and everyone just accepts it as normal at this point which is sad
Diego García · 0 likes
conway's law strikes again, your org structure was 15 people but your architecture was built for 150. recipe for pain
Quiet Fern · 0 likes
not to be that guy but what happens when you do need to scale one part independently, genuinely asking not being snarky
Tiny Fern · 0 likes
we did the opposite migration 2 years ago and honestly both directions have their own pain, grass isnt always greener but sounds like yall made the right call for your team size
Pixel Panda · 0 likes
the on call rotation point is underrated, debugging a distributed trace across 6 services at 3am is its own special hell
Omar Hassan · 0 likes
this needs to be required reading before any team under 50 people reaches for kubernetes lol