Why Organizations Are Putting Microservices Back Together 

For many years, microservices were considered a top choice for companies looking to scale rapidly and become independent while remaining flexible in terms of development team activities. Creating microservices by dividing the application into pieces was viewed as progress in terms of architecture. However, in 2026, the situation is different. Some companies are beginning to merge their services as they understand that having dozens of services becomes a burden.

Expensive infrastructure, complicated deployment process, complicated debugging, and communication become a burden very quickly. This new direction does not mean that microservices architecture is a failure, but on the contrary demonstrates the importance of choosing the architecture according to the needs of the business, its size, and potential.

The CNCF Data on Microservices Consolidation 

According to the CNCF 2025 Annual Survey, 42% of companies that have adopted microservices are currently working towards consolidating their services back into bigger units because of reasons like difficulty of debugging, operational cost, and network latency.

That represents a remarkable shift from the framing that dominated conversations from roughly 2015 through 2023, when the assumption was that microservices adoption would increase over time as organizations scaled. The survey also tracked service mesh adoption, which stood at 18% in the third quarter of 2023 and fell to 8% by the third quarter of 2025, signaling that the infrastructure community is backing away from tooling built specifically to manage microservices complexity at scale. 

These numbers represent organizations that have already invested in the migration, hired specialized engineers, rebuilt their deployment pipelines, and established observability infrastructure, only to discover that the engineering cost exceeded the business benefit. This is not about teams disliking microservices; it’s about teams dealing with the reality of microservices. 

The Hidden Costs That Grow After the Breakup 

Monolithic applications can be built 40% faster and cheaper than microservices-based systems, according to analysis from multiple sources across 2025 and early 2026, which is why the comparison has historically been framed as a question of whether the organization is scaling fast enough to justify the higher upfront cost. What is less visible in those comparisons and what teams encounter only after committing is the operational reality that microservices double DevOps costs on an ongoing basis, since each service requires additional monitoring, logging, tracing, and deployment infrastructure, and that growth accumulates as the number of services increases. 

The fact that DevOps scaling is a recurring expense and not a one-time cost that can be written off means a team that decided to use microservices architecture to solve scaling problems in theory now employs permanent staff who work on maintaining distributed systems complexity that brings no business value whatsoever for applications that could easily scale in a monolith environment. The comparison that seemed appealing initially is now revealed for what it is once the engineers realize that the atomic transaction in a monolith application becomes an ordeal involving several services and a migration across databases with debugging in numerous logs.

Why Scaling Is Not the Question Most Teams Should Ask 

The underlying assumption behind the adoption of microservices was that there was predictability in application growth and reaching scale points, so the right thing to do was to design the right architecture from the start. That assumption collides with reality because most applications never reach the scale where microservices become genuinely necessary, which is why Basecamp, Stack Overflow, and Shopify built substantial businesses on well-structured monolithic applications and why Shopify continues to operate a primarily monolithic architecture while handling transactions worth billions of dollars annually. The scaling stories told at technology conferences tend to come from the tiny fraction of companies that reached hypergrowth, so the framing that microservices are necessary for success is based on an unrepresentative sample. 

By the time an organization genuinely needs the scaling properties that microservices provide, the team has accumulated enough engineering maturity that building the distributed architecture becomes far simpler, so the question of whether to adopt microservices is not a beginning-of-project choice but a decision that should come after an organization has clarity on whether it will reach the scales where the architecture becomes necessary. In the year 2026, teams are now wondering if they should begin with a modular monolith system where the application is built as a single component, yet has been designed to be broken down into individual modules with clear boundaries, giving the structural benefits of microservices with reduced complexity.

The Organizational Consequences of Architecture Choices 

The architecture chosen by the team will not just define the technical aspects but also the skill sets needed for hiring, the structure of the team, and organization dynamics resulting from it. Microservices architectures require specialized engineers with deep knowledge of distributed systems, service mesh operations, and observability at scale, which are relatively rare skills that command premium compensation. 

A good monolith is something that can be managed by experienced full-stack engineers and even mid-level engineers without necessarily having experts in infrastructure patterns, making the talent pool wider compared to the talent pool for the microservices architecture.

That organizational constraint is not incidental to the architecture decision; it is a primary driver of many teams finding that they chose microservices without the organizational capacity to maintain them properly, which means the system degrades over time as debugging complexity accumulates and as the institutional knowledge required to navigate the distributed system lives in a small set of engineers whose departure creates cascading risk. 

How to Make the Architecture Decision in 2026 

The pragmatic position that is emerging across the industry is that architecture choices should be driven by clarity on actual requirements rather than by assumptions about future scale, which means an organization starting a new web application should start by building the simplest well-structured architecture that supports the initial product and team size, then migrate to additional complexity only when actual traffic and actual team growth make the current architecture a genuine constraint. 

A modular monolith represents a middle ground where an organization develops an application as a deployable unit, but pays attention to defining the modules and separating concerns from the very beginning; this way, migrating to a microservices architecture would be easier if needed, yet many organizations would find it unnecessary because the modular monolith would be enough for scaling.

The first step in the process would be performing the math based on the particular situation in terms of traffic pattern and the size of the team involved, as well as future expansion potential and cost of infrastructure at the existing level of operation, rather than some hypothetical scenario the company hopes to achieve. 

Most organizations should start with web application development services focused on building a well-structured, defensible architecture for the team’s current scale, then revisit the architecture periodically as the organization and its requirements evolve, rather than paying permanent costs for infrastructure complexity built to handle scenarios that may never materialize. The teams that maintain applications long-term and that are responsible for software product development services as the application grows are increasingly making the case that complexity should be added only when the data clearly shows it is necessary, not when industry consensus suggests it might be. 

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