The Monolith Strikes Back: When a Monolith Still Beats Microservices

Oluyinka Ahmed Abubakar — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:52:42 +0000

Somewhere along the line, microservices became the default answer to every architectural question—like the tech equivalent of "let's form a committee." But the moment you've actually run a distributed system in production, you start seeing the cracks.

Here are the moments where a monolith still wins without breaking a sweat:

When you spend more time stitching services together than building actual features.
When a simple bug fix turns into a safari across eight repos, three pipelines, and a trace ID longer than your weekend.
When your “independent deployments” still require team-wide coordination because the contracts can’t sit still.
When your startup is running nine services at 50 RPS total and the DevOps bill looks like you're streaming Netflix in 16K.
When onboarding a new developer requires a 40-minute architecture TED Talk and a whiteboard marker that gives up halfway.

In those moments, a clean, modular monolith starts looking less like nostalgia and more like high-performance strategy.

A monolith gives you focus, speed, and clarity. Microservices give you scale and autonomy, but only when you genuinely need them and you're ready to pay the operational tax.

Real architectural leadership isn't about chasing trends. It's about aligning tech choices with your team’s execution capacity and your product's actual trajectory.

The monolith isn't outdated. It's the adult in the room.
And not every project needs to "form James Bond" just to ship a login page.

I come in peace!

Forem: Oluyinka Ahmed Abubakar

The Monolith Strikes Back: When a Monolith Still Beats Microservices