At Techkraft, we migrated a high-volume financial application from .NET Framework to .NET Core and broke it apart from a monolith into microservices. The headline result was a 35% reduction in system latency. What the Jira ticket didn't capture was everything else.
Why We Did It
The monolith had served us well, but the cracks were showing. Deployments were risky — a change to the reporting module could silently break payment processing. Scaling was blunt; we scaled everything to handle peaks in one service. And onboarding new engineers meant understanding the entire system before touching any of it.
The Decomposition Strategy
We didn't do a big-bang rewrite. We used the strangler fig pattern: identify a bounded context, extract it behind an API, route traffic to the new service, then sunset the old code path.
The first service we extracted was reporting. It was high-read, low-write, and had a clear boundary. We gave it its own SQL Server read replica and a Redis cache layer. Latency on the reporting endpoints dropped immediately.
What Actually Took Time
Data consistency. In a monolith, you get transactions for free. In microservices, you have to think carefully about what "consistent" even means. We ended up using an outbox pattern for cross-service writes — events written to a local table, picked up by a background worker, published to a message bus.
The other thing: observability. When a request spans four services, a single log file tells you nothing. We integrated distributed tracing early, and it saved us weeks of debugging later.
The Result
35% latency reduction is real, but the more valuable outcome was deployment independence. Teams could ship without coordinating with every other team. That's the actual win.