Modular Monolith Architecture in .NET: The Pragmatic Middle Ground

The Problem No One Talks About in the Microservices Hype It's 2019. Your team has just finished migrating a perfectly functional ASP.NET MVC app to microservices. You now have 14 services, a Kubernetes cluster, a service mesh, distributed tracing, a message broker, and three engineers whose full-time job is keeping it all running. Feature velocity? Cut in half. Onboarding a new developer? Two weeks just to understand the infrastructure. Sound familiar? The architecture community spent a decade evangelizing microservices as the solution to every scalability and maintainability problem. And while microservices genuinely solve hard problems at scale, they come with an enormous operational and cognitive tax — one that most product teams can't afford, and frankly don't need to pay. Enter the Modular Monolith: not a retreat to the big ball of mud, and not the complexity of distributed systems. It's an architectural style that enforces clear internal boundaries while keeping the simplicity of