Breaking the Monolith: When (and When Not) to Switch

The Allure of Microservices

It's the industry standard for giants like Netflix and Uber. Naturally, every startup CTO wants to adopt microservices day one.

This is often a mistake.

The Distributed Tax

Microservices solve organizational scaling problems, not just request scaling problems. They allow independent teams to deploy independently. But they introduce a "tax":

1. Network Latency: Function calls become HTTP requests.
2. Data Consistency: You lose ACID transactions across services.
3. DevOps Complexity: You need robust orchestration (Kubernetes) and observability.

When to Switch

We advise our clients to stick to a Modular Monolith until they hit specific triggers:

• Trigger 1: One specific module (e.g., Image Processing) requires significantly different hardware resources (GPU vs CPU) than the rest of the app.
• Trigger 2: Scaling the entire app is too costly when only one feature is under load.
• Trigger 3: You have distinct teams blocking each other's deployments.

Our Strategy at Pixelync

We often start clients on a unified Next.js + Nest.js backend. It's easy to debug and deploy. We structure the code into strict "domains". When a domain grows too large, we slice it out into a separate service wrapped in Docker.

"Grow into complexity, don't start with it."

Build for today, architect for tomorrow.