We Didn’t Migrate the Monolith-We Restructured the Gravity Around It
Article summary
We Didn’t Migrate the Monolith-We Restructured the Gravity Around It Everyone kept asking, “When are we moving off the monolith?” It was the wrong question. The right one was: what should the monolith still be doing? We inherited a legacy core-slow, reliable, feature-rich, but inflexible. Developers hated it. Business users depended on it. Rewrites were too risky, and microservices looked like freedom. But when we tried to move everything out, we didn’t get agility-we got complexity. What we needed wasn’t a mass migration. We needed to change the forces acting on the system. The Problem Wasn’t the Monolith. It Was Our Relationship to It It had no clear scope. It did everything-from identity to billing to feature toggles. No single team understood it end to end. It was the system of record for everything. New services couldn’t stand on their own. They had to ask the monolith for truth.
Read Full Article on MediumPractical takeaway
The main idea behind We Didn’t Migrate the Monolith-We Restructured the Gravity Around It is to help teams move from broad theory to clear, repeatable decision making. When teams apply this thinking, they reduce ambiguity and focus on improvements that deliver measurable momentum.
Example scenario
Imagine a team facing competing priorities. By applying the ideas in We Didn’t Migrate the Monolith-We Restructured the Gravity Around It, they can map dependencies, identify risks and choose the next move that produces progress without destabilizing their system.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Trying to redesign everything instead of taking small steps.
- Ignoring real constraints like incentives, ownership or legacy systems.
- Creating documents that do not lead to any change in code or decisions.
How to apply this in real work
Start by identifying where We Didn’t Migrate the Monolith-We Restructured the Gravity Around It already shows up in your architecture or delivery flow. Then pick one area where clarity would reduce friction. Apply the idea, measure its effect and share the learning.
Signs you are doing it correctly
- Teams make decisions faster and with fewer disagreements.
- Architectural conversations become clearer and less abstract.
- Changes land safely with fewer surprises or rework cycles.