This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Mariano Barcia
From the perspective of a monolith, handing over ownership of a piece of data to a microservice feels like a hostile takeover. To make matters worse, the monolith doesn’t just lose those features — it has to be refactored to depend on the new service instead. If the whole point of migration was to stop investing in the monolith, this can feel like regression. Strong justification is required.
This is why the first microservice is always the hardest.
Two challenges at once
When you launch that first service, you’re not just building a new component. You’re building the platform that supports it — infrastructure, pipelines, processes, observability. At the same time, you’re modifying the monolith to work with it.
What used to be a straightforward in-memory call now becomes a network request. Data that lived in the same heap must now travel through an API. Latency appears where there was none, and eventual consistency creeps into flows that were once instantaneous.
The dual effort — building the new while bending the old — makes the first step disproportionately painful.
The grind of infrastructure
On paper, spinning up microservices sounds simple. In practice, you often need to establish a baseline of tooling before you can ship anything meaningful:
- Containerization (Dockerfiles, images, registries)
- Orchestration (Kubernetes clusters or alternatives)
- Messaging or event streams (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, …)
- API gateways, authentication, and routing
- Observability (logging, metrics, tracing)
And sometimes, service meshes or other advanced tools sneak in before you’re ready. All of this setup is invisible to business stakeholders, yet it consumes enormous time and energy.
Data gravity and adaptation
Meanwhile, the monolith doesn’t go quietly. It has strong “data gravity” — everything around it is pulled into its orbit because it already has the data and the logic close at hand. Asking it to delegate that responsibility to a new service means changing well-worn paths: queries become requests, joins become lookups, consistency guarantees weaken.
This is the moment when a team can feel like progress has slowed to a crawl.
The turning point
But once the first microservice is truly in production, something important shifts. The monolith no longer owns everything. There is now precedent: data and responsibility can be transferred out.
You’ve also learned hard lessons — how to replace in-memory function calls with inter-process communication, how to cope with retries and idempotency, how to migrate ownership of data, and how to operate a new service in production.
The next service won’t require reinventing all of this. The platform is in place, the practices are established, and the team’s confidence has grown.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Mariano Barcia
Mariano Barcia | Sciencx (2025-08-20T15:35:40+00:00) The pioneering microservice. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/20/the-pioneering-microservice/
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