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LetsGit.IT/Categories/Monoliths
Monolithshard

How do you find good boundaries (seams) for extracting services from a monolith?

Tags
#bounded-context#seams#decomposition
Back to categoryPractice quiz

Answer

Look for bounded contexts: features with clear ownership, data, and few dependencies. Start with parts that change often or have clear scaling needs, and avoid splitting tightly coupled areas first.

Advanced answer

Deep dive

Expanding on the short answer — what usually matters in practice:

  • Context (tags): bounded-context, seams, decomposition
  • Scaling: what scales horizontally vs vertically, where bottlenecks appear.
  • Reliability: retries/circuit breakers/idempotency, observability (logs/metrics/traces).
  • Evolution: keep changes cheap (boundaries, contracts, tests).
  • Explain the "why", not just the "what" (intuition + consequences).
  • Trade-offs: what you gain/lose (time, memory, complexity, risk).
  • Edge cases: empty inputs, large inputs, invalid inputs, concurrency.

Examples

A tiny example (an explanation template):

// Example: discuss trade-offs for "how-do-you-find-good-boundaries-(seams)-for-extr"
function explain() {
  // Start from the core idea:
  // Look for bounded contexts: features with clear ownership, data, and few dependencies. Star
}

Common pitfalls

  • Too generic: no concrete trade-offs or examples.
  • Mixing average-case and worst-case (e.g., complexity).
  • Ignoring constraints: memory, concurrency, network/disk costs.

Interview follow-ups

  • When would you choose an alternative and why?
  • What production issues show up and how do you diagnose them?
  • How would you test edge cases?

Related questions

Architecture
DDD bounded context: what is it and why is it useful?
#architecture#ddd#bounded-context
Microservices
What is a microservice (in practice, not a buzzword)?
#microservices#architecture#bounded-context