Why Microservices Kill Startups

You read a blog post from Netflix about how they manage 500 microservices. You look at your team of 3 engineers and decide, "We should do that." Two years later, you have 10 services, zero users, and a cloud bill that costs more than your burn rate.

The Consistency Nightmare

In a Monolith, if you want to save a User and their Profile, you do it in a single database transaction. It either works or it fails. In microservices, you save the User in Service A, then try to save the Profile in Service B. If Service B fails, you now have a "zombie" User. Welcome to the hell of distributed transactions and eventual consistency.

Modular Monolith: The Saner Alternative

We advocate for the "Modular Monolith." Build your application as a single deployable unit (e.g., one Django project), but enforce strict boundaries between modules internally:

• Shared Utility, Separated Logic: Share authentication and logging, but keep Billing code away from Profile code.
• Zero Network Latency: Function calls are instant. HTTP calls between services are slow and flaky.
• Unified Deployment: One CI/CD pipeline. One database backup. Simple.

Scale When It Hurts

Extract a service only when you have a specific bottleneck (e.g., video processing uses too much CPU). Until then, build a beautiful, boring Monolith.