Every enterprise architect eventually faces this question: should we go microservices?
The answer — and I hate how cliché this sounds — is that it depends. But not on the technology. On your team, your deployment cadence, and your operational maturity.
When you have three or more independent development teams shipping on different schedules, microservices start making sense. The overhead of coordination in a monolith becomes the bottleneck, not the code. With five to ten developers? A well-structured monolith will almost always outperform a distributed system. The debugging surface alone makes microservices painful at small scale.
Independent deployability is the real signal. If your HR module deploys weekly but inventory deploys monthly, that's a genuine reason to separate them. They have different rhythms and different risk profiles. But if every module shares the same release train, you're adding network latency for no operational benefit.
Data ownership matters too. Each microservice should own its data completely — no shared databases, no foreign keys crossing service boundaries. If your entities are deeply interconnected, you're probably not ready. The data model tells you more about your readiness than any architecture diagram.
And you need the operational plumbing: centralized logging, automated CI/CD, service discovery, distributed tracing. Without these, you're just creating a distributed debugger's nightmare.
What I've found across multiple enterprise projects: start with a modular monolith. Clean boundaries inside the codebase, but one deployable unit. Extract services selectively when the pain of the monolith exceeds the pain of distribution. The architecture should serve the business, not the other way around.