The monolithic architecture that powers most Indian enterprises is not inherently bad. Monoliths are simple to develop, test, and deploy in the early stages of a system's life. The problem appears at scale: when fifteen teams are all working on the same codebase, deployment becomes a coordination nightmare, a bug in one component can bring down the entire system, and scaling a single heavily-loaded function requires scaling everything.
Microservices architecture solves these problems by decomposing a monolith into a collection of small, independently deployable services, each owning its own data and communicating via APIs. Amazon's transition from monolith to microservices in the early 2000s is the canonical example: it enabled them to deploy thousands of times per day and scale individual services — search, recommendations, checkout — independently based on demand.
For Indian enterprises considering microservices, the first question to answer is: do you have the organisational structure to support it? Conway's Law states that systems mirror the communication structure of the organisations that build them. Microservices require small, autonomous teams that own services end-to-end. If your engineering organisation is structured by function — a central database team, a central UI team, a central backend team — you will build distributed monoliths, not microservices.
The migration path from monolith to microservices should be evolutionary. Identify the bounded contexts in your domain — the areas of the business with clear ownership and limited coupling. Extract those first. Payments, notifications, and user authentication are commonly good starting points because they are high-traffic, well-defined, and owned by a single team.
Microservices bring operational complexity: service discovery, distributed tracing, circuit breaking, and API gateway management all become new responsibilities. Invest in observability infrastructure before you need it, not after your fifteenth service is in production.