Ravi Teja Thutari shares some advice:
The legacy e-commerce platform was a PHP-based monolith handling catalog, orders, inventory, and customer data. With business growth, the monolith could not scale further. Maintaining feature velocity was hard because every change risked the entire system. We needed scalability, resilience, and faster releases. Shifting to event-driven microservices promised to address these issues. In practice we adopted Kafka on Kubernetes, similar to other online retailers .
Our priorities were (1) decoupling services so each team could deploy independently, (2) modeling business events consistently across domains, and (3) ensuring reliable delivery at scale (with retries and DLQs for failures). As a starting point, we documented key domain events (e.g.
OrderCreated,PaymentProcessed,InventoryAllocated) and sketched a target architecture. Like other high-traffic systems, we planned horizontal scaling: adding Kafka brokers and topic partitions to match consumer parallelism. We also planned for observability from Day 1 (metrics, logs, traces) to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues.
Read on for more information about how that migration went.