# Upday's Journey from Monolithic Backend Components to Microservices

DevFeed: [Upday's Journey from Monolithic Backend Components to Microservices](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/finding-yourself-in-the-world-of-backend-architecture-35115.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://upday.github.io/blog/upday-be-architecture/>)

Author: María Fernández Pajares (maria@upday.com)

Published: 2017-08-22T22:55:55Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Upday](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/upday.md>)

Topics: [Back end](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backend.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>), [Microservice](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/microservice.md>), [Java](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/java.md>), [Spring Boot](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/spring-boot.md>), [Ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ruby.md>)

Tags: [architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/architecture.md>), [backend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backend.md>), [conway-s-law](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/conway-s-law.md>), [java](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/java.md>), [microservices](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/microservices.md>), [ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ruby.md>), [spring-boot](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/spring-boot.md>)

## AI overview

The article describes upday's backend architecture journey, beginning with Java and Spring Boot monolithic components and later moving toward microservices as the company and backend teams grew. It also discusses how architecture and team structure can shape each other.

## Source excerpt

I have always wanted to write about our journey through the world of backend architectures. As a developer, you may have been facing problems related to this topic in your team or with your projects. You might even be aware of the magical and trendy solutions out there, but sometimes these don't perfectly fit your current needs. This topic has not been - and it is not yet - an easy one for us either, but after facing many problems we now find ourselves in the world of backend architecture. Therefore I would like to share a few of our experiences and learnings in this area at upday. Conway's Law's reversion In conferences I have attended I have heard references to what could be interpreted from Mel Conway's Law: A backend architecture is a reflection of the team setup. and I totally agree with that but I also think that with time it may become the other way around: the architecture can end up shaping the team instead of the team shaping the architecture. Let me dig more into the challenges we face this time around and how we managed to resolve them: Our firsts architectural steps At upday we started with a small team of developers tasked with creating a robust solution to fulfill our client's requirements of reliability and providing good quality content to our readers. As in most startups, everything started fast and in a rush. The solution we finally came up with consisted of two monolithic components written in Java and Spring Boot. Together they form the core of our system. But they were not the only ones. We also had other smaller components written in Ruby or Java, which took care of minor requirements. When this setup worked properly and was production ready, we went live with it. When our architecture started to have flows When our company started growing, it was impossible to stick to only one big team of backend developers. We started splitting our backend team into feature teams. This was not an optimal setup at that time, given these two big components ha