Lessons Learned: From Monolith to Microservices

At Pridesys IT Ltd, I led the redesign of our cloud ERP application from a monolithic architecture to microservices. Here are some lessons I learned along the way.

Why we migrated

Our monolith had grown to a point where deployments were risky and slow. A single bug in one module could bring down the entire system. We needed better fault isolation and the ability to scale services independently.

Key decisions

Kafka for decoupling – We chose Apache Kafka as our message broker. It gave us reliable async communication between services and acted as a buffer during traffic spikes.

Helm + Vault for Kubernetes – Managing secrets across multiple microservices was a challenge. Hashicorp’s Vault integrated with our K8s cluster solved this cleanly. Helm charts made deployments reproducible.

CI/CD from day one – We set up GitHub Workflows early. Each microservice has its own pipeline. This reduced our integration headaches significantly and cut development time by about 20%.

What I’d do differently

• Start with fewer, larger services and split later. We went too granular too early.
• Invest in observability before the migration, not after. We spent too much time debugging issues that proper logging would have caught immediately.

Microservices aren’t a silver bullet, but for our use case – a multi-tenant ERP with varying load patterns – it was the right call.