4 lessons
The monolith, and why it wins by default
What a monolith actually is, why it's the right starting architecture for nearly every project, and where it genuinely starts to strain.
What microservices actually cost
The real, honest tradeoffs of splitting a system into services — network calls, distributed transactions, and operational overhead.
Where to draw service boundaries
How to actually decide what becomes its own service, using business domains and independent scaling needs as the guide.
Holding it together in production
How independent services actually find and talk to each other reliably at runtime, and the patterns that keep one failing service from taking down the rest.