Reading an RFC Problem Statement — Comprehension Exercises

RFC-0047: Migration from Monolith to Service-Oriented Architecture 1. Introduction and Motivation OrbitShip's core application has grown from a single deployable unit of ~12,000 lines of code in 2019 to over 340,000 lines today. Deployment times have increased from 4 minutes to 47 minutes. A change in the billing subsystem requires a full redeployment of every feature, including the unrelated notification and analytics modules. 2. Problem Statement The current limitations are: (a) deployment coupling — unrelated teams must coordinate every release; (b) scaling inefficiency — the entire monolith must be scaled even when only the search service is under load; (c) test suite duration — the full test run now takes 94 minutes, blocking continuous delivery. 3. Non-Goals This RFC does not propose migrating the database schema, rewriting the frontend, or addressing performance issues unrelated to deployment coupling. These are separate concerns and out of scope. 4. Proposed Solution (overview) We propose extracting three high-traffic services — billing, search, and notifications — as independent deployable units in Q3 2026, with the remaining monolith continuing to operate. Full migration is a multi-year effort and not the goal of this RFC.