The Monolith Problem
Pied Piper started as one big Rails app. Scaling got hard.
The Plan
Break into services:
- Auth service
- Compression engine
- API gateway
- Storage service
- Analytics service
The Process
Step 1: Identify Boundaries
What can be isolated?
Step 2: Extract One Service
Start with least risky.
Step 3: Build Communication Layer
REST APIs + message queue.
Step 4: Repeat
One service at a time.
Step 5: Sunset Monolith
Eventually.
Challenges
- Data consistency
- Network latency
- Debugging complexity
- Deployment orchestration
Results
- Better scaling
- Faster deployments
- Team autonomy
- More operational complexity
Worth it? Yes. Easy? No.