Monolith to Microservices Transformation (2-Year Platform Evolution)
Context
Monolithic architecture causing 45-60 minute deploy times, blocking multiple teams who were colliding on each other's code changes. Test suites taking hours to run. Production elasticity issues where traffic spikes weren't detected quickly enough by HPAs, causing availability interruptions and customer impact. Teams did not have any microservice experience. Teams unable to work independently, creating bottlenecks across the organization.
Action
Led 2-year microservices adoption strategy coordinating across data, product, engineering, QA, and DevOps teams. Established Kubernetes platform with automated infrastructure provisioning, deployment pipelines, node group strategies, security protocols, service mesh for internal traffic controls. Deployed GraphQL federation to create frontend-backend contracts enabling decoupled development. Implemented event-driven architecture for data streaming between services. Introduced architectural quanta concepts and trained teams on domain/data decomposition, fracture planes, transactional sagas, and service sizing strategies. Built developer CLI tooling for service scaffolding and operations. Established service ownership paradigms with uptime responsibilities. Migrated to a schema registry of Protocol Buffers for backwards-compatible service contracts in gRPC and through Kafka.
Result
Reduced deployment times from 45-60 minutes to 2-4 minutes (95% improvement). Successfully decomposed monolith into 40+ production microservices over 2 years. Eliminated team blocking with independent service deployments. Improved system elasticity with granular scaling per service. Achieved 99.9% uptime through service-level ownership and monitoring. Enabled parallel development across all teams. Reduced the blast radius of the application. Introduced type-safey with golang and distroless container security to our infrastructure.