Distributed Monolith
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A distributed monolith is what happens when you split your monolith into microservices but they're all still tightly coupled. You get all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits. Congratulations, you've built the worst of both worlds.
Real Talk
An anti-pattern where a system is deployed as multiple services but they are tightly coupled — they must be deployed together, share databases, or have synchronous chains of calls. A distributed monolith has the operational complexity of microservices without the independent deployability, scalability, or fault isolation benefits.
When You'll Hear This
"If you have to deploy all services together, you've built a distributed monolith, not microservices." / "The distributed monolith is the number one outcome of poorly planned microservices migrations."
Related Terms
Coupling
Coupling is how much two pieces of code depend on each other. Tight coupling means changing one breaks the other — like Siamese twins.
Microservice
Microservices is an architecture where instead of one big app, you have many tiny apps that each do one thing.
Modular Monolith
Modular Monolith is the best of both worlds: one deployable app (monolith) but organized into clear, separate modules that could become microservices somed...
Monolith
A monolith is one big application that does everything. User management, payments, emails, notifications — all in the same codebase, deployed together.