Introducing Our Expert

This week on Tech Talk, we're diving into one of the biggest debates in backend development: monoliths versus microservices. The microservice trend grew significantly in recent years, but is it slowing down? Where does the industry stand in 2025?

To get the ground truth, we sat down with Orestis Charalampakos, a senior backend engineer with 7 years of professional experience and a HighCircl expert.

For Orestis, software engineering was a natural path. After starting his career as a frontend developer, he eventually found his passion in backend services - he finds it rewarding to make users' lives easier through data manipulation. He cut his teeth on complex airport delivery and distribution systems and has since honed his skills in fast-paced startups.

Q: Before we dive into the benefits of microservices, let’s cover the basics. What exactly is a monolithic system?

A: A monolith is an application built as a single, unified unit. Imagine one project and one codebase that contains the business logic for every feature of the application. While you can modularize the code within the project, at the end of the day, it's one cohesive piece of software that gets deployed all at once.

Q: What are the benefits of starting with a monolith?

A: Simplicity and speed. In general, monoliths are easier to design, build, and maintain, especially early on. This translates directly to lower initial costs. Deployment is often straightforward - a single pipeline can handle the whole process. This simplicity also extends to hosting costs, as you're managing one application instead of a fleet of services.

Q: Lower costs and easier maintenance sound great. So what's the catch?

A: The catch is scalability, both for the code and the team. What starts as a benefit can become a major disadvantage as a project matures and grows more complex.

The codebase can become a "big ball of mud" - huge and difficult to navigate. A single bug can bring down the entire application, and release cycles slow down as testing becomes more time-consuming. You also face technology lock-in: you're stuck with the tech stack you chose at the start, unless you're prepared for a massive refactoring effort.

Q: How do microservices solve these problems?

A: Microservices are designed to fix exactly these scaling issues. Think of a system with user authentication, payments, and inventory management. Instead of being modules within one large application, each of these becomes its own independent service.

Each service is a mini-application with its own codebase, its own database, and even its own technology stack. The only rule is that they must be able to communicate with each other, usually via APIs. This approach has huge benefits:

• Targeted Scaling: Experiencing a surge in orders? You can scale just the payment and inventory services without touching anything else.
• Faster Onboarding: New developers only need to understand a small part of the system to become productive, not the entire monolith.
• Resilience: If the inventory service has a bug, it doesn't take down user authentication or payments. The rest of the system can remain operational.

Q: With those advantages, why not use microservices for everything?

A: Because with great power comes great complexity. It's not a silver bullet. The operational overhead of a microservice architecture is significantly higher. You're no longer deploying one thing; you're managing dozens of services, each with its own pipeline, monitoring, and infrastructure. It's a distributed system, and distributed systems are inherently hard to get right.

Q: Microservices have been trending for years. How should teams choose in 2025?

A: You need a deep understanding of your business domain to draw the service boundaries correctly. If you get them wrong, you can end up with a tangled mess that's worse than any monolith. You have to be confident that these core service boundaries won't need radical changes every few months.

My advice is almost always to start with a well-structured monolith. Don't overengineer from day one. Focus on a domain-driven approach to build a simple, effective solution first. Once your product finds its market fit and the domain boundaries become crystal clear, you can strategically break it apart into microservices. This "Monolith First" approach saves you from premature complexity and lets you move fast when it matters most.

About HighCircl Tech Talk

Tech Talk is a weekly series of interview-format articles discussing important technological changes and news. Each week, we go deep into tech stacks and best practices by chatting with an expert from HighCircl.