Monolith to Microservices#

The decision to break a monolith into microservices is one of the most consequential architectural choices a team makes. Get it right and you unlock independent deployment, team autonomy, and targeted scaling. Get it wrong and you trade a manageable monolith for a distributed monolith – all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits.

When to Stay with a Monolith#

Microservices are not an upgrade from monoliths. They are a different set of tradeoffs. A well-structured monolith is the right choice in many situations.

Refactoring Terraform#

Terraform configurations grow organically. A project starts with 10 resources in one directory. Six months later it has 80 resources, 3 levels of modules, and a state file that takes 2 minutes to plan. Changes feel risky because everything is interconnected. New team members (or agents) cannot understand the structure without reading every file.

Refactoring addresses this — but Terraform refactoring is harder than code refactoring because the state file maps resource addresses to real infrastructure. Rename a resource and Terraform thinks you want to destroy the old one and create a new one. Move a resource into a module and Terraform plans to recreate it. Every structural change requires corresponding state manipulation.