[deniska]

> People throw around “distributed monolith” like it’s a dirty phrase but I’ve found it actually a very pleasant environment to work in.

For ones I saw, the answer to the question "how do I run our project on a single laptop?" is "haha, you don't". That makes features which could take hours to implement take weeks. But deployment is 5 minutes instead of… 15? Not too worthy of a trade-off.

Your CSV writer probably has both technical and organizational reasons being an independent unit of development. Or, in other words, something which appeared organically, rather than someone deciding months prior before a project even started that authentication and user profiles should live in two parallel universes.

[salt-thrower]

You bring up an excellent point. As of now, it is impossible for me to run my company's backend ecosystem on my machine locally. What we do could easily be done by one simple monolith, but our eng. lead is obsessed with overengineered microservice architecture, so nobody can actually develop locally. Everything on the backend is done by a bunch of lambdas behind an API gateway.

I got so burnt out developing in that environment that I asked to become a pure frontend dev so that I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.

[p_l]

Often with monoliths, once they go into production service at scale, the deployment can be "3 days, arranged 4 weeks in advance, requiring 9 sign offs including one VP"

[goliatone]

I would call that a megalith, and not to be cute but to give a sense of scale which is useful. I think there is a point in which a monolith grows so big that is painfully obvious that size became an obstacle greater than the benefits. Pain tolerance differs so the label gets applied at different sized monoliths.