A monolith with tentacles: What to expect when you start adding services to a legacy codebase

You work on a web app that's grown and evolved over a few years. The backend stack you started with is familiar, and it's mostly accommodated your app's growing complexity. But you've started to hear a persistent voice calling to you: "We've outgrown our monolithic app! A service-oriented architecture will solve all our problems!"

If you've heard this voice and are intrigued by its promise, or have worked in a codebase navigating the tension between a central monolith and service-oriented model, this session is for you! I'll share what I've learned in the 5+ years since Reverb decided to introduce services around our Rails monolith, and there will be space for others to share their own experiences and ask questions.

Some topics we'll cover:
* Clarifying why you're re-architecting your application: Scaling an organization vs. scaling technology
* How do you actually split up an existing application?
* Tying it all together: Inter-service communication, API gateways, and frontend/client considerations
* Anticipating the operational overhead that comes with multiple services

• Development