Microservices vs Monolith: When and Why to Break Up Your Codebase

As applications grow and teams scale to 100-plus members, monolithic codebases become difficult to maintain, with merge conflicts, slow deployments, and performance bottlenecks emerging as common pain points. Monitoring data often reveals that different services — such as chat, feed, and payments — have vastly different usage patterns, making uniform scaling inefficient and costly. Microservices architecture addresses this by splitting an application into independently deployable, domain-specific services, each with its own logic and potentially its own database. This allows teams to scale, deploy, and maintain individual services without affecting the rest of the system. However, microservices introduce their own challenges, including network latency, complex distributed transactions, and the need for an API Gateway to route requests seamlessly across services.