October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
310 pages
7h 6m
English
Content preview from Crafting Engineering Strategy
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 20. Service Architecture Strategy
Since the first introduction of microservices in 2005, the debate between adopting a microservices architecture, a monolithic service architecture, or a hybrid between the two has become one of the least reversible decisions that most engineering organizations make. Even migrating to a different database technology is generally a less expensive change than moving from monolith to microservices or from microservices to monolith.
The industry has in many ways gone full circle on that debate. While most hyperscalers in the 2010s took part in multiyear monolith-to-microservices migrations, Kelsey Hightower’s iconic 2017 tweet predicted that “Monolithic applications will be back in style after people discover the drawbacks of distributed monolithic applications.”
Even as popular sentiment has generally turned away from microservices, many engineering organizations have a bit of both, often the remnants of one or more earlier but incomplete migration efforts. This service architecture strategy looks at a fictional organization stuck with a bit of both approaches and looking to determine its path forward. Let’s call it Theoretical Compliance Company.
Reading This Document
This chapter contains just one document, Document 20-1: Should We Decompose Our Monolith?, written in 2022.
If you’re reading this document with the goal of applying the strategies it puts forward, start at the top and read to the end. If, on the other hand, your main goal ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.