--- title: "Should You Split That Into Microservices? Ask These 5 Questions First" url: https://daily.dev/posts/should-you-split-that-into-microservices-ask-these-5-questions-first-5e7orzjkr source_url: https://milanjovanovic.tech/blog/should-you-split-that-into-microservices-ask-these-5-questions-first type: article source: "Milan Jovanović" published: 2026-07-31T19:03:19.450Z updated: 2026-08-01T08:17:30.070Z tags: ["career", "architecture", "microservices", "distributed-systems"] reading_time: 5 upvotes: 63 comments: 2 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Should You Split That Into Microservices? Ask These 5 Questions First **[Milan Jovanović](https://daily.dev/sources/milanjovanovic)** · 5 min read · 63 upvotes · 2 comments ## Summary 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. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@elvismilans** · 1 upvotes > Why microservices? **@ahmetozel** · 1 upvotes > The data-boundary question is the one I would weight most heavily because code can be separated long before ownership of state is real. If two proposed services still need cross-database transactions or synchronous calls for every write, the boundary is probably organizational fiction. A good first extraction has one authoritative data owner, an outbox for published changes, and a rollback path to the modular monolith. Measuring cross-boundary call volume before the split often reveals the coupling more honestly than a component diagram. --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#microservices](https://daily.dev/tags/microservices), [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/should-you-split-that-into-microservices-ask-these-5-questions-first-5e7orzjkr)