How we structure a product, and what it costs to change.

Usually not. Microservices pay off when several teams must release independently or when one component has very different scaling or compliance needs. Below that point they add network failures, tracing, contract testing and on-call duty without adding product value. We start with a modular monolith whose boundaries are ready to become services, and we extract one only when a measured need appears.

It is one application deployed as one unit, but organised inside into modules that talk to each other only through defined interfaces. Billing cannot reach into the orders database directly; it calls the orders module. You get the simplicity of one process and one pipeline, while keeping the option to lift any module into its own service later without a rewrite.

We look at the shape of the traffic and the length of the work. Short, bursty or occasional tasks such as webhooks, image resizing and scheduled reports suit functions. Long-lived connections, steady traffic, heavy dependencies or strict latency needs suit containers. Many of our systems use both: a containerised core with functions around the edges, all defined in one infrastructure repository.

Handover starts on day one, not at the end. Every repository ships with a README that gets a new developer running locally, architecture decision records that explain why things are the way they are, C4 diagrams, a runbook for deployments and incidents, and CI that enforces tests and linting. You own all code, designs, accounts and IP, and we walk your team through it on recorded calls.

We follow the testing pyramid: many fast unit tests, a smaller layer of integration tests against real databases and queues using containers, and a few end-to-end browser tests for the critical paths. Every push runs the suite, every merge to the main branch deploys to a staging environment, and production releases are a reviewed, reversible step with health checks and automatic rollback.

Yes, and we prefer to. We map the current system, add tests and observability around the parts that matter, then move responsibilities out one seam at a time, often using the strangler pattern behind an API gateway. The business keeps shipping while the structure improves, and each step can be paused or reversed if priorities change.

Each significant choice gets an architecture decision record: the context, the options considered, the decision and its consequences, in a page or less, stored in the repository next to the code. Diagrams follow the C4 model so a newcomer can zoom from the system context down to a component. The record is updated when the decision changes, so the history is never lost.