Microservices aren't the only way to get high cohesion and low coupling.

Materialized View

The post argues in favor of modular monoliths as an alternative to microservices for achieving high cohesion and low coupling in software architecture. It highlights the challenges associated with scaling monoliths and migrating to microservices, such as increased complexity and the need for extensive tooling. The author suggests that modular monolithic applications, which include tooling for incremental build systems, testing, branch management, and database isolation, offer a balanced solution. This approach can extend the life of a monolith and make transitioning to a service-based architecture more manageable.

Modular Monoliths Are a Good Idea, Actually

Wow, the author discovered modular monoliths, finally. Actually, the same codebase can be used as a modular monolith or as microservices if the architecture is proper. A good architecture doesn’t even rely on the modules being written in the same language as the core framework. Just as with microservices. Modular monoliths can be seen as local microservices. The separation of concerns can be exactly the same. What microservices was good for, is that it enforced the proper separation. The same is true when someone is using React to build an app. It is just enforcing a clean, component-based approach. But you can achieve the same much faster with, for example, PHP. You can use similar components as in React, but render them on the server. It is all about finding the right architecture. Everyone is getting close, but there still is room for improvements in the most popular frameworks. Just as a hint, drop the router from the core framework. It is not supposed to be there, its place is in the CMS.

Microservices are all the hype because they force separation of concerns, which should result in cleaner code.
When code does not run on the same machine/environment (i.e. microservices) developers are imposed certain constraints which result in a more scalable solution (usually).
If you put the same effort in a monolith, you get the same gains, it’s just harder because you need to not cut corners and put certain constraints on yourself, which you might not do if you are timecrunched.

If you decouple modules properly, you will be able to separate them into microservices easily. This is one approach to the problem:
<a href="https://magyarbertalan.substack.com/p/laravel-modulemicroservice-hybrid" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://magyarbertalan.substack.com/p/laravel-modulemicroservice-hybrid</a>