The monolith versus microservices debate is often framed as old versus new. The reality is more nuanced — each architecture has situations where it’s clearly the better choice.
Understanding Monoliths
A monolithic application is a single deployable unit containing all functionality. One codebase, one deployment process, one running application. Laravel applications are typically monolithic, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Monoliths are simpler to develop, test, deploy, and debug. There’s no network latency between components, no distributed data consistency challenges, and no service discovery to configure. For most applications, a well-structured monolith is the right architecture.
Understanding Microservices
Microservices decompose an application into independent services, each responsible for a specific business capability. Each service has its own codebase, database, and deployment pipeline. Services communicate through APIs or message queues.
Microservices excel when different parts of your application have different scaling requirements, different development velocities, or different technology needs. If your order processing needs to scale independently from your user management, microservices enable that.
When Monoliths Win
Start with a monolith when your team is small (under 10 developers), when you’re building an MVP or early-stage product, when your requirements are still evolving, or when deployment simplicity is a priority. A monolith lets a small team move fast without the overhead of managing distributed systems.
When Microservices Win
Consider microservices when your application has grown to the point where different teams own different features, when specific components need independent scaling, when you need to use different technologies for different features, or when deployment coordination has become a bottleneck.
The Modular Monolith: The Middle Ground
A modular monolith organises code into clearly bounded modules within a single application. Each module has defined interfaces and doesn’t reach into other modules’ internals. This provides most of microservices’ organisational benefits without the distributed systems complexity.
If you eventually need microservices, a modular monolith is easy to decompose — each module becomes a service. A tangled monolith is much harder to break apart.
Common Microservices Mistakes
Splitting too early: if you don’t understand your domain well enough to draw clean service boundaries, you’ll draw them wrong. Wrong boundaries create a distributed monolith — all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits.
Sharing databases: services that share a database are coupled at the data level. Changes to the schema affect multiple services. Each service should own its data.
Our Approach
At Masterpiece Designs, we build modular monoliths with Laravel. The structure supports clean code organisation and team scaling. If a client’s application grows to the point where specific components need independent deployment or scaling, we extract those components into services. We’ve never started a project with microservices, and we’ve never regretted starting with a monolith.