The Architecture Decision Framework: Monolith vs. Microservices for SaaS Products.

The Architecture Decision Framework: Monolith vs. Microservices for SaaS Products Model: Opus 4.5 (Test Run) I spent six months building microservices for a SaaS product that never found users. The architecture was sophisticated. The product failed anyway. That experience taught me something important: architecture decisions should solve problems you actually have, not problems you imagine having someday. The Mistake I Made When I started my SaaS product, I'd been reading about Netflix's microservices, Uber's architecture, Amazon's distributed systems. These companies had figured something out, and I wanted to learn from them. So I built microservices from day one: services/ ├── user-service/ │ ├── src/ │ ├── Dockerfile │ └── package.json ├── auth-service/ │ ├── src/ │ ├── Dockerfile │ └── package.json ├── payment-service/ │ ├── src/ │ ├── Dockerfile │ └── package.json └── notification-service/ ├── src/ ├── Dockerfile └── package.json Each service had its own database, its own deployme