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Some architecture decisions are made calmly, with data, over a nice cup of coffee.
And then there's real life, where you pick your tech stack the same way you pick a favorite sports team: because you saw it in a cool conference talk, because some big-name company uses it, or because someone tweeted that "if you don't have 80 microservices running on Kubernetes, you're a dinosaur."
Next thing you know, you've gone from a lovable monolith — a little messy but functional — to a circus of services where nobody really knows what talks to what, your cloud bill is terrifying, and the only microservice running flawlessly is the one that charges you at the end of the month. All because, at some point, somebody stopped asking the only question that actually matters:
"What real problem am I actually trying to solve?"
That's exactly what this article is about. Turning down the noise, taking a calm look at the monolith (that old friend who's been unfairly trashed), having a laugh at microservices-as-religion, and — most importantly — walking away with a framework you can actually use when someone asks: "so, do we build this as a monolith or split it into a gazillion services?"
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Title Microservices, Monoliths, and Other Mythical Creatures
Some architecture decisions are made calmly, with data, over a nice cup of coffee.
And then there's real life, where you pick your tech stack the same way you pick a favorite sports team: because you saw it in a cool conference talk, because some big-name company uses it, or because someone tweeted that "if you don't have 80 microservices running on Kubernetes, you're a dinosaur."
Next thing you know, you've gone from a lovable monolith — a little messy but functional — to a circus of services where nobody really knows what talks to what, your cloud bill is terrifying, and the only microservice running flawlessly is the one that charges you at the end of the month. All because, at some point, somebody stopped asking the only question that actually matters:
"What real problem am I actually trying to solve?"
That's exactly what this article is about. Turning down the noise, taking a calm look at the monolith (that old friend who's been unfairly trashed), having a laugh at microservices-as-religion, and — most importantly — walking away with a framework you can actually use when someone asks: "so, do we build this as a monolith or split it into a gazillion services?"
Work type Article
Tags software development, software engineering, programming, opinion, blog
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Registry info in Safe Creative
Identifier 2603084800696
Entry date Mar 8, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC
License Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0
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Author. Holder Lino Figueroa Villar. Date Mar 8, 2026.
Information available at https://www.safecreative.org/work/2603084800696-microservices-monoliths-and-other-mythical-creatures
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