Engineering Journal

We spent three months breaking the monolith into stateless microservices. It was the "best practice." But here's the dirty secret nobody tells you:complexity doesn't disappear; it just shifts to the network.

Now, instead of a clean local transaction rollback, we have distributed sagas, dead letter queues, and eventual consistency nightmares. The code is "cleaner," but the infrastructure is a chaotic web.

If I had to do it again, I would have built a modular monolith first. Keep the logic separated by domain, but keep the deployment unit singular until the database is screaming for help.