Choosing Microservice Boundaries Without Creating a Distributed Monolith
A practical framework for splitting services around business capabilities, ownership, and failure isolation without over-fragmenting the system.
Most distributed monoliths begin with good intent. Teams split a codebase into services, but keep the same release pressure, shared database assumptions, and cross-service coordination habits. The result feels modern on a diagram and slow in production.
A healthier boundary starts with ownership. A service should own a business capability, its data rules, its operational signals, and the decisions needed to evolve it. If two teams must negotiate every field change, the boundary is probably too thin.
Before creating a service, ask what failure it isolates, what deployment it unlocks, and which user workflow it protects. If the answer is mostly 'because this module is large', a modular monolith may be the better next step.
Written by
Algoskool Team
