Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
Microservices
What are microservices?
Microservices are an architectural style where an application is split into small, independent services, each owning one capability and talking to the others over the network, usually through APIs. Payments is one service. Search is another. Notifications another. Each can be built, deployed, scaled, and even written in a different language by a different team, without touching the rest.
The alternative is a monolith, where all that logic lives in a single deployable codebase. Microservices buy independent deployment, targeted scaling, and fault isolation: if search falls over, checkout keeps running. They cost you distributed-system complexity in return. Network calls fail, data is spread across services, and tracing a single request across a dozen hops is genuinely hard. An online marketplace might scale its search service to a hundred instances during a sale while the user-profile service quietly runs on two, which is the kind of independent scaling a monolith cannot do cleanly.
Microservices are not a default. They pay off for large systems and large teams, and they punish small ones with overhead a monolith would never impose.
Microservices at Dallonses
The honest advice we give most clients is to start with a well-structured monolith and split out services only when a real pressure demands it: a team that keeps blocking another, a component that needs to scale on its own, a part of the system with a wildly different reliability profile. Splitting too early buys distributed-systems pain before there is any benefit to justify it. We have rescued more projects from premature microservices than we have pushed toward them.
When the split is warranted, the boundaries between services matter more than anything else, and those boundaries are API contracts. Our custom web application development and API-first development work treats those contracts as the real product, with versioning, testing, and clear ownership. Done right, the architecture also feeds into platform standardization, so every service is built, deployed, and observed the same way instead of becoming a dozen snowflakes.
Weighing a monolith against microservices, or untangling one that grew too fast? Let's map it out together.
Related services
Related works
Vizitio
Turning a brand into a working business.
Access Ticket
Half a million people. One app. Zero chaos.
Ready to work together?
Book a meeting
