The Myth of the Monolith

How often have we heard somebody talk about their existing monolith, or ask the question "How do you break down the monolith?". Turns out, with PHP, we have never really built monoliths, because our applications were never compiled down to single executable files. Instead, we have always deployed a collection of source files - which in fact already looks a lot like microservices. So it does not surprise us that our decisions to "break down the monolith" do not yield the expected results - most of our prerequisites are plain wrong.

It's time to take a fresh look at how we can deal with PHP legacy code, and fix our distributed monoliths.