Conway's law tells us that organizations will produce designs whose structure is a copy of their communication structure. This often means that the organizational chart of an engineering team will have a profound impact on the structure of the designs of the software it produces. When a new startup begins building software, the team is small—sometimes it is comprised of just one or two engineers. In this setup, engineers work on everything, including frontend and backend systems, as well as operations. Monoliths suit this organizational structure very well, allowing engineers to work on any part of the system at any given time without moving between code bases.
As a team grows, and you start to consider the benefits of ...
