The journey into microservices started clean - we had small, independent services that worked great on our local machine. Everything was greenfield and productivity couldn't be higher. Until the production switch flipped and nothing worked in a proper distributed environment.

Something went horribly awry in our microservice megadisaster, but monoliths can ease the pain by removing the distributed nature of our system. However, we don't want to repeat our mistakes of creating a big ball of mud, or a big ball of distributed mud. Enter the modular monolith, an architecture that preserves the beneficial aspects of a single application and the advantages of isolated areas of data and behavior.

In this talk, we'll look at the various patterns of modularizing a monolith. We'll answer such questions as "what even is a Module?", how to draw module boundaries, and evolutionary design techniques to migrate an existing monolith. Finally, we'll look at techniques to extract modules into services, giving the best possible chance for a microservice architecture to thrive.