Monolith First

Many go to Martin Fowler for microservice architecture, distributed systems, micro frontends, event sourcing, and other fancy ideas about architecture, but a few have noticed the advice to do a monolith first:

As I hear stories about teams using a microservices architecture, I’ve noticed a common pattern.

  1. Almost all the successful microservice stories have started with a monolith that got too big and was broken up
  2. Almost all the cases where I’ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble.

This pattern has led many of my colleagues to argue that you shouldn’t start a new project with microservices, even if you’re sure your application will be big enough to make it worthwhile.