Dev.to
7/17/2026

Why monolithic architectures are outperforming microservices for most teams
Original: The monolith won. Most teams just haven't admitted it yet.
Short summary
The article argues that monolithic architectures outperform microservices for most teams, citing Prime Video's 90% cost reduction after consolidating a serverless setup into a monolith and Shopify's 2.8M-line monolith handling 32M requests/minute. Microservices impose hidden taxes: cloud data-transfer fees, sprint capacity lost to YAML and debugging, and resume-driven complexity. Companies like 37signals saved millions by leaving cloud entirely for owned hardware.
- •Prime Video cut infra costs 90% by moving from serverless to a monolith
- •Shopify runs a 2.8M-line monolith at 32M req/min using Packwerk for domain boundaries
- •37signals saved ~$10M over five years by buying Dell servers instead of using cloud
Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.
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