Modular Monolith in Practice: Problems, Patterns and Practical Examples (part 1)

Modular monolith gained popularity as the hype around microservices slowly went down. The community realized that the most important part of modularization happens during the discovery and design phase, and that an implementation heavily based on infrastructure doesn’t magically solve all problems – and can even add additional complexity (or simply make things more complicated). This is where, especially in the early phases, an implementation using a modular monolith has the possibility to shine.

During this hands-on workshop, let’s dive together into the world of modularization based on business bounded contexts – how to approach it both in the discovery/design phase and in the technical implementation. We will go through topics related to defining boundaries, modules’ internal architecture, communication between modules, and data isolation. We will use a Symfony framework–based application as an example, while keeping things reasonably framework-agnostic. Discussions about the classes of used mechanisms should allow transferring this knowledge later to tools from other ecosystems.

This approach will help us understand the concepts and patterns behind the modular monolith approach and observe how framework mechanisms can support us in some areas without dictating all the rules. All of the above, in combination with hexagonal architecture, should help us achieve our goal in terms of modules autonomy and team ownership.