Architecture Finder
“What architecture should I use?” Answer questions about team size, deployment independence, scaling characteristics, data ownership, reliability and complexity tolerance. Every recommendation says why, what the risks are, and what the alternatives were — and it starts from the simplest option that could work.
Describe the team, the load and the data. The finder starts from "one deployable with strong internal boundaries" and only leaves it when a named organisational or scaling problem demands it — and it tells you when the thing you want is a distributed monolith.
Step 1
How big is the team, and what are you running today?
Count teams that need to ship independently, not engineers. Two people cannot benefit from service boundaries; eight teams cannot avoid them.