You own a customer-facing application that currently runs as a single service on DigitalOcean Kubernetes with a managed PostgreSQL backend and Spaces for object storage. Product teams want to split it into microservices to speed up delivery, but your current monolith has simpler network paths, fewer identities, and centralized logging. Recent incidents showed that debugging cross-service failures and inconsistent authorization decisions are already becoming harder as internal APIs are added.
How would you evaluate the security and infrastructure trade-offs between keeping the monolith and moving to microservices, and what architecture and migration approach would you recommend? Be explicit about the threats introduced or reduced, the controls you would add, and how you would verify the design is working in production.
Security trade-offs of monolith vs microservicesTrust boundaries and workload identity inside DOKSAuthorization consistency across internal APIsMigration sequencing, risk reduction, and operational verification