Struggling with monoliths that turn into unmanageable beasts? This talk explores the modular monolith architecture as a compelling alternative to microservices, balancing maintainability with operational simplicity. Learn how to leverage Spring Modulith and JMolecules to create self-documenting code that clearly expresses Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles. We will also see how to implement event-driven architecture and distributed transactions, exploiting their advantages such as high cohesion and low coupling, and sidestepping many of the complexities associated with, such as compensation actions and patterns like transactional outbox, message relay and dead letter queue.