I Gave Up on Microservices and Went Back to Laravel. Here's Why.

• Microservices Made Me Miserable
• I Rebuilt in Laravel—One Repo, One Focus
• It Wasn’t About Laravel. It Was About Sanity.
• Modular Monoliths: The Sweet Middle Ground
• You’re Not Netflix (and That’s Okay)
• Final Thought: Simplicity is a Feature

Microservices Made Me Miserable

Look, I bought into the hype. Everyone did. Conferences, blog posts, Twitter threads—“Monoliths are dead,” they said.

So, I broke my app into tiny services. Auth. Billing. Notifications. Even the blog had its own API.

At first, it felt modern. But slowly, it turned into a mess.

• I had 12 GitHub repos just to launch a new feature.
• CI/CD pipelines broke all the time.
• Debugging across services? Nightmare.
• Devs were afraid to touch anything.

I wasn’t running a product anymore. I was running a distributed systems course. And I was failing it.

I Rebuilt in Laravel—One Repo, One Focus

One weekend, out of frustration, I rewrote everything in Laravel. Not because I thought it was trendy. Not because it was cool.

But because I wanted to ship one thing without opening five terminals.

It was supposed to be a temporary hack. But it worked. It worked so well that I never went back.

It Wasn’t About Laravel. It Was About Sanity.

Laravel gave me a few superpowers out of the box:

• Auth, queues, caching? Already solved.
• A dev experience that felt pleasant again.
• A single source of truth. No more “Where does this live?”

But more than that, it gave me space to think again. To focus on the product, not the plumbing.

No YAML rituals. No Docker incantations. Just me, my code, and the joy of building.

Modular Monoliths: The Sweet Middle Ground

Here’s the secret: You don’t have to choose between a spaghetti monolith and 27 microservices.

What I built is a modular monolith. Clear folder boundaries, domain-driven logic, and one deployment pipeline.

If I ever outgrow it? I can peel off modules into services. But for now?

• Local dev takes seconds.
• Onboarding a new dev? Easy.
• Shipping weekly? Totally normal again.

You’re Not Netflix (and That’s Okay)

Every time I hear someone say “But what if we scale?” I want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Most apps won’t reach that level. And if they do, it won’t be overnight. Don’t start with architecture meant for companies with 500 engineers.

Start with something that helps you build.

For me, that’s Laravel. In 2025, it feels more relevant than ever—not as a PHP framework, but as a pragmatic choice.

Final Thought: Simplicity is a Feature

You don’t get points for making your system complex. You get points for shipping features, fixing bugs, and making your users happy.

Laravel helped me fall back in love with software again.

So if you’re stuck in microservice hell, burnt out from DevOps drama, and wondering where the fun went?

You might just find it in a simple Laravel project.

I did.