Should You Split That Into Microservices? Ask These 5 Questions First

Before splitting a monolith into microservices, five diagnostic questions help determine if the trade-off is justified: (1) Do parts of the system have measurably different scaling needs today? (2) Are multiple teams genuinely blocking each other in a shared codebase? (3) Can you draw clean, non-entangled data boundaries between candidate services? (4) Does anything require independent failure isolation or release cadence for compliance or availability reasons? (5) Can the team afford the platform tax — container orchestration, distributed tracing, CI/CD per service, and reliability patterns — before seeing any benefit? Scoring: 4-5 yes answers justifies splitting, starting with one service. 2-3 suggests a modular monolith instead. 0-1 means keep the monolith and invest in making it excellent. Most microservices regret stems from making the split decision before the reasons existed.