
Ask HN: What's a good book on breaking apart monoliths? - monolithbook
I&#x27;m working with a company right now that&#x27;s struggling to maintain a huge monolith that lives on what&#x27;s basically a mainframe. <i>Everything</i> is tightly coupled, to the point that our database tables haven&#x27;t been modified in <i>fifteen years</i> -- every modification requires a new table and a JOIN.<p>Some people are starting to recognize that something smells. I&#x27;m struggling to explain alternate philosophies like &quot;cattle not pets&quot; and phrases like &quot;tightly coupled&quot;.<p>One of our less-technical managers mentioned he feels like he needs to read a book on databases, but I think what he really needs to read is something that explains how we can (and should) separate systems via things like webservices, how paradigms have shifted over the past 20 years, and how we can make our systems more adaptable to change.<p>I&#x27;m reading <i>Working Effectively with Legacy Code</i>, but that&#x27;s too deep in the nitty-gritty technical side of things.<p>Are there any good books that give more of a 10,000 foot architectural view of how to dig yourself out of a legacy monolith?
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itamarst
Maybe "Building Microservices", by Sam Newman. It's an architect-y point of
view, but it's definitely got some examples of coupling-via-database and how
to deal with it.

It may be that a monolith is just fine, nothing inherently wrong with
monoliths in many cases. Not being able to change anything... less so.

