3 posts tagged with "Architecture"

Two years ago, I led the effort to break our company's aging monolith into microservices. It was the standard story: the monolith had become unwieldy, deployments were risky all-day affairs, and different teams kept stepping on each other's toes. The microservices transformation was painful but ultimately successful—teams could deploy independently, scaling became more granular, and we finally escaped dependency hell.

But something interesting happened along the way. As the industry accumulated more experience with microservices, the conversation began to shift. The pendulum that had swung hard toward extreme service decomposition started to swing back. Teams realized that the complexity they had pushed out of their codebases had reappeared in their infrastructure. The "microservices tax" was real, and sometimes steep.

Today, I want to share where I see microservices architecture heading, based on both my team's journey and broader industry trends. We're entering what I call the "post-monolith world"—where we've collectively learned enough hard lessons to move beyond the false monolith/microservices dichotomy.

Last quarter, our CFO called me into an unexpected meeting. "Our AWS bill has doubled in the past year," she said, sliding a chart across the table. "We need to get this under control without slowing down product development."

This wasn't a unique situation. Across the industry, companies are facing the same challenge: cloud costs are spiraling upward while budgets are tightening. The days of treating cloud resources as essentially unlimited are over.

After three months of focused effort, we reduced our cloud spend by 42% without compromising performance or reliability. In this post, I'll share the strategies, tools, and architectural patterns that worked for us, along with the hard-earned lessons from approaches that didn't.

When I launched my first SaaS product back in 2018, I made almost every architectural mistake possible. We chose the wrong database, overengineered our infrastructure, and underestimated the complexity of multi-tenancy. The result? Countless late nights debugging production issues and a codebase that became increasingly difficult to evolve.

Fast forward to today, and I've helped build and scale several successful SaaS platforms. The landscape has changed dramatically in just a few years—new tools, platforms, and patterns have emerged that make building scalable SaaS applications more accessible than ever.

In this post, I'll share the hard-won lessons and current best practices for building a SaaS that can scale from your first customer to your first thousand, without requiring a complete rewrite along the way.