The microservices hype cycle has officially plateaued. After years of breaking everything down into lambda functions, the engineering community has realized that distributed computing is fundamentally hard.
At BroskiesHub, we adopt a pragmatic approach to system architecture.
The Modular Monolith: A Safe Starting Point
For 80% of new projects, starting with a microservices architecture is a mistake. It introduces network latency, complex deployment pipelines, and debugging nightmares prematurely.
Instead, we champion the Modular Monolith. Build a single deployable unit, but enforce strict logical boundaries within the codebase. If the domain modules are truly decoupled, breaking them out into separate microservices later (when scale demands it) becomes trivial.
When to Actually Extract a Microservice
You should extract a service when:
- Independent Scaling: A specific function (e.g., PDF generation, video encoding) requires drastically different hardware profiles or scaling metrics than the rest of the app.
- Independent Deployment: A specific team needs to iterate and deploy a feature set rapidly without coordinating with the core platform release cycle.
- Technological Isolation: A specific feature requires a language or framework best suited for that task (e.g., using Python for a machine learning inference service alongside a Node.js core).
Managing the Chaos
If you do go down the microservices route, robust observability is non-negotiable. Implementing distributed tracing (like OpenTelemetry), centralized logging, and strict API contracts (GraphQL or gRPC) are prerequisites for success.
BroskiesHub Team
The Team
Insights and perspectives from the BroskiesHub engineering and product team.
