Ever since distributed software became more popular, developers have been deciding whether to use monolithic architectures or service oriented architectures. With the advancement of cloud infrastructure and the widespread implementation of agile methodologies, the latter approach has been getting much easier.

We’ll talk about how a monolithic app can become too big to handle due to its ever increasing technical debt, and afterwards we’ll show how to gradually reduce it by extracting its components into smaller services, so that ultimately you have a very decoupled and highly distributed application.

As our example, we’ll use an E-commerce site implementation. The starting point will be a full-blown traditional Rails monolith and then we’ll move towards a Static Site with automated rebuilds, a decoupled CMS and Stripe as a payment gateway.