Microservices architecture has proven to be an invaluable approach in large-scale projects, offering significant benefits in reducing merge conflicts and enabling clear separation of concerns. We've found that this architectural pattern leads to a more scalable service landscape and facilitates better team organization, especially as projects grow and require distribution of responsibilities across multiple teams. The architecture's ability to support independent deployment and scaling of services makes it particularly attractive for organizations looking to improve their development agility and system resilience.
While conventional wisdom suggests starting with a monolith and later transitioning to microservices, we've observed that organizations with existing infrastructure capabilities (monitoring, tracing, deployment pipelines) can successfully adopt microservices even with smaller teams. The improved maintainability can justify the increased infrastructure costs, particularly in growing projects. We've found particular value in implementing Self-Contained Systems (SCS), which provide a pragmatic middle ground between monoliths and fine-grained microservices by combining the benefits of service autonomy with reduced operational complexity.
However, one critical aspect that requires careful consideration is the long-term evolution of business relationships between microservices. Service boundaries that appear logical today may not align with future business requirements. In one of our largest projects, we established a new microservice three years ago based on what seemed like clear domain separation. However, six months ago, business stakeholders presented feature requests that necessitated implementing complex inter-service synchronization patterns. The resulting architectural complexity ultimately led us to merge the two services back into a single unit to maintain code maintainability. This experience reinforced the importance of anticipating business domain evolution and maintaining flexibility in service boundaries, as premature or overly granular service decomposition can create more problems than it solves.