Microservices to Monoliths: The Great Architectural Walk of Shame

Microservices to Monoliths: The Great Architectural Walk of Shame

Remember 2018? When every tech blog was screaming that if you weren’t breaking your application into microservices, you were practically coding on stone tablets? When “monolith” became a four-letter word in architecture discussions?

Well, well, well… how the turntables.

In the year of our lord 2025, we’re witnessing what insiders are calling “The Great Microservice Regret” — companies quietly rebuilding their Frankenstein’s monster of 150 microservices back into sensible, maintainable monoliths while trying not to make eye contact with the architects who got them into this mess in the first place.

The Microservice Delusion: A Timeline of Pain

2015: Netflix publishes a blog post about microservices.

2016: Every tech lead at every company: “We need to be like Netflix!”

2017: Companies start decomposing working monoliths into microservices.

2018: “Kubernetes” becomes the most common word on LinkedIn, narrowly beating “synergy.”

2019: Companies realize they now have 50 repositories, 200 AWS services, and a deployment pipeline that requires a PhD to understand.

2020: Quiet murmurs of “this might have been a mistake” begin in Slack channels.

2021: First “Why We’re Moving Back to a Monolith” blog posts appear, written by brave souls.

2022: Executives start asking uncomfortable questions about cloud costs.

2023: “Modular Monolith” enters the chat as the face-saving exit strategy.

2024: Mass migration back to monoliths, but we’re calling them “integrated service architectures” to avoid admitting mistakes.

2025: You, reading this article, either nodding in painful recognition or sweating because you just finished your microservice migration last week.

What We Thought vs. What We Got

What We Thought Microservices Would Give Us:

1. Independent deployments (We can update one service without touching others!)
2. Team autonomy (Each team owns their services!)
3. Perfect scalability (Scale only what you need!)
4. Technology diversity (Use the right tool for each job!)
5. Fault isolation (One service down doesn’t mean everything’s down!)

What We Actually Got:

1. Deployment nightmares (Wait, which version of Service A works with which version of Service B?)
2. Distributed debugging hell (The error could be in any of our 73 services!)
3. Latency issues (What do you mean each HTTP call adds 100ms?)
4. Data consistency problems (Turns out distributed transactions are hard!)
5. Kubernetes complexity (We now have an entire team just to maintain our K8s clusters!)
6. Cloud bills that make executives cry (We’re paying HOW MUCH for all these load balancers?)

The Microservice Tax Nobody Told You About

When tech blogs were breathlessly promoting microservices, they conveniently forgot to mention all the additional “taxes” you’d be paying:

1. The API Design Tax: Now every internal function call is an HTTP request that needs API design, versioning, documentation, and client libraries.

2. The Distributed Debugging Tax: Finding a bug now requires tracing a request across dozens of services, each with their own logs and monitoring.

3. The Deployment Infrastructure Tax: You now need Kubernetes, service meshes, API gateways, centralized logging, distributed tracing, and a team to maintain all of that.

4. The Cognitive Overhead Tax: Developers can no longer hold the entire system in their head, making it harder to reason about changes.

5. The Consistency Tax: Keeping data consistent across services is now YOUR problem, not the database’s.

6. The Duplication Tax: Every service needs its own error handling, logging, authentication, authorization, and config management.

Signs You Should Never Have Gone Microservices

If any of these sound familiar, you might have made a terrible mistake:

1. You have more services than developers.

2. Your architecture diagram needs to be printed on a plotter.

3. It takes a new developer more than a month to make their first meaningful contribution.

4. Your production issues now require a “war room” with representatives from multiple teams to diagnose.

5. You’ve created an entire wiki just to document service dependencies.

6. Your Slack has channels like #service-discovery-issues and #kafka-outage-updates.

7. You’ve had serious discussions about building your own service mesh.

8. Your “two-pizza team” concept has evolved into a “two-pizza team per microservice” reality, and now everyone’s on a diet.

The Walk of Shame Back to Monoliths

So how are companies escaping microservice hell without admitting they made a colossal mistake? Through the magic of rebranding!

The Microservice Exit Strategies:

1. “Modular Monolith” - It’s a monolith, but we’re pretending it’s still modern by emphasizing its internal modules.

2. “Service Consolidation” - We’re not abandoning microservices; we’re just “optimizing” by merging 30 services into one.

3. “Domain-Driven Monolith” - We still used DDD principles, just… within a single application.

4. “Right-Sized Services” - Turns out the “right size” is “big enough to contain an entire domain.”

5. “Integrated Service Architecture” - The most creative way to say “monolith” without saying monolith.

Real Companies, Real Reversals

You’re not alone in this architectural walk of shame. Here are some notable companies that have shared their journey back:

1. Segment - Went from 80+ microservices back to a monolith and saw a 30% decrease in latency.

2. Istio - Even the service mesh designed for microservices decided to consolidate its control plane into a monolith.

3. Karma - Spent 6 months migrating to microservices, then 12 months migrating back after hitting scaling issues.

4. Ably - Realized their microservices architecture was actually slower and more complex than a well-designed monolith would be.

How to Survive the Next Pendulum Swing

The microservice-to-monolith pendulum swing isn’t the first architectural fashion trend, and it won’t be the last. Here’s how to avoid getting caught in the next one:

1. Question the Assumptions - When someone says “Netflix does it this way,” ask if you have Netflix’s problems, scale, and resources.

2. Start Simple - Begin with a clean, modular monolith and extract services only when there’s a clear, measurable benefit.

3. Measure Before Migrating - Have concrete metrics for what success looks like before making any architectural change.

4. Consider the Whole Ecosystem - Architecture isn’t just about code; it’s about teams, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.

5. Avoid Resume-Driven Development - If you’re adopting a technology primarily so developers can add it to their LinkedIn, that’s a red flag.

The Humble Monolith Renaissance

Let’s be clear: monoliths can be terrible too. A big ball of mud is no one’s idea of good architecture. But a well-structured, modular monolith can provide many of the benefits of microservices with far less overhead:

1. Deployment Simplicity - One app to build, test, and deploy.

2. Transaction Safety - Database transactions just work, no distributed systems headaches.

3. Lower Operational Complexity - Fewer moving parts means fewer things to monitor and maintain.

4. Faster Development Cycles - No need to coordinate changes across multiple repositories and services.

5. Lower Infrastructure Costs - Fewer instances, load balancers, API gateways, etc.

How to Build a Monolith That Won’t Make You Cry

The real lesson isn’t that microservices are always bad or monoliths are always good. It’s that architecture should match your actual needs, not your aspirational ones.

For most companies, here’s how to build a monolith that won’t turn into a nightmare:

1. Enforce Modularity at Code Level - Use packages, modules, or internal libraries with clear boundaries.

2. Design Around Domains - Apply domain-driven design principles within your monolith.

3. Establish Clear Ownership - Teams can own domains or modules within the monolith.

4. Be Conservative with Dependencies - Minimize dependencies between modules to keep coupling low.

5. Automate Tests and Deployments - Just because it’s a monolith doesn’t mean you can’t have modern CI/CD.

Conclusion: The Pendulum Always Swings

In the end, the great microservices-to-monolith migration of 2025 is just another reminder that software architecture, like fashion, moves in cycles. What’s old becomes new again, just with fancier names and blog posts explaining why this time it’s different.

The true experts aren’t the ones who blindly follow these trends – they’re the ones who understand the fundamental tradeoffs and choose architectures that match their actual problems, not their imaginary future problems.

So whether you’re currently maintaining 100 microservices or a monolith the size of Montana, remember: the goal isn’t architectural purity. It’s building something that solves real problems for real users without making your developers contemplate a career change to goat farming.

And if you did just finish breaking your app into microservices… well, don’t worry. Just save this article for 2027 when you need to justify moving back. The pendulum always swings again.