Trying to keep it simple (to a degree). First of all, I would say that its OK to still have a monolith and even build a whole product as a monolith and break it down as the need for microservices arises.
My understanding of whether or not you should take a monolith and cut it into pieces is that it depends on what you want to achieve.
Every monolith is specific, or are they?
Without knowing what your product does I bet you have an API, a UI layer or two, some business logic and maybe throw emailing or a payment service. Well, guess what? We all have those!
How to decide.
For myself, I’ve tried to boil it down to 3 questions:
1. Will I need to scale this part of the monolith more (often) than others?
2. Does this part of the monolith handle an entire process on its own from start to finish?
3. Does this part of the monolith require a lot of different code or resources than the other parts?
The questions are simple. They aren't philosophical. They don’t have a hidden meaning. Rather, a series of simple booleans. If something needs to be a microservice it'll most likely hit 3 out of 3 of those.
My understanding of whether or not you should take a monolith and cut it into pieces is that it depends on what you want to achieve.
Every monolith is specific, or are they? Without knowing what your product does I bet you have an API, a UI layer or two, some business logic and maybe throw emailing or a payment service. Well, guess what? We all have those!
How to decide. For myself, I’ve tried to boil it down to 3 questions:
1. Will I need to scale this part of the monolith more (often) than others? 2. Does this part of the monolith handle an entire process on its own from start to finish? 3. Does this part of the monolith require a lot of different code or resources than the other parts?
The questions are simple. They aren't philosophical. They don’t have a hidden meaning. Rather, a series of simple booleans. If something needs to be a microservice it'll most likely hit 3 out of 3 of those.