/ðə ˈmɒnəlɪθ ˈrɛkwiəm/
Definition
A nostalgic lament sung by engineers who once mocked their monolithic architecture, only to discover that decomposing it into microservices merely redistributed the pain. The Monolith Requiem celebrates a simpler era — when deployment meant copying one file, not orchestrating an inter-service opera of chaos.
Common Manifestations
- Veterans whispering, “At least the monolith had transactions.”
- Team leads reminiscing about “tight coupling” like it was a lost romance.
- Infrastructure teams quietly rebuilding parts of the monolith in secret.
- A recurring internal Slack meme: “Maybe the real scalability was the friends we made along the way.”
- New hires stunned to learn that the old system still handles 80% of production traffic.
Usage Example
“We said goodbye to the monolith three years ago, yet its spirit still handles logins, payments, and all of accounting.”
HR Guidance
Treat Monolith Nostalgia as a normal stage of the Microservices Grief Cycle.
Encourage storytelling circles, legacy appreciation lunches, and memorial architecture diagrams.
If symptoms persist, quietly rebuild the monolith in Kubernetes and call it a Service Mesh.