The Eternal Debate
Every enterprise architect eventually faces this question: "Should we go microservices?" The answer: **it depends**.
The Decision Framework
1. Team Scale
**Microservices make sense when you have 3+ independent development teams.** With 5-10 developers, a well-structured monolith outperforms a distributed system.
2. Independent Deployability
Do different parts of your system have genuinely different deployment cadences? If HR deploys weekly but inventory deploys monthly, that's a signal for separation.
3. Data Ownership
Each microservice should own its data completely. Deeply interconnected entities suggest you're not ready.
4. Operational Maturity
You need centralized logging, automated CI/CD, service discovery, and distributed tracing.
What I've Learned
Most enterprise systems benefit from **modular monolith first, selective extraction later**. The architecture should serve the business, not the other way around.