Lessons Learned Migrating a Monolith to High-Performance Microservices

How our team reduced latency by 70% and handled 100k requests/sec without breaking production.

Guillermo Rauch
Sep 24, 2026·11 min read
Lessons Learned Migrating a Monolith to High-Performance Microservices

Photo from Unsplash · Curated for Medium

Microservices are not a silver bullet, but when your engineering team scales past 50 engineers, decoupling domain boundaries becomes essential for deployment velocity.

Why Protocol Buffers Beat JSON

By moving from JSON over HTTP/1.1 to binary Protobuf serialization over HTTP/2 with gRPC, we eliminated massive payload overheads and gained type-safe contract guarantees across our polyglot backend services.

Guillermo Rauch
Written byGuillermo Rauch94,500 Followers

CEO at Vercel. Creator of Next.js, Socket.io, and Mongoose. Passionate about web performance.