Sid and the GitLab team continue to enjoy their Rails-based “modular monolith”

A modular monolith is the exact opposite of a distributed ball of mud: a well-structured, well-architected, highly modular program that runs as a single process and is as boring as possible.

Sid doesn’t pull any punches. No regrets!

Wouldn’t it be better to have a proper plugin interface? Or better yet, a services interface modeled on microservices? In a word: no. Not only do these approaches impose deployment and integration hurdles that go far beyond “I made a small change to the source code,” they often enforce architectural constraints too rigidly. Anticipating all the future extension points is a fool’s errand, one that we luckily did not embark on and do not have to.