What factors should you consider when deciding to split a monolith into multiple microservices, and how would you evaluate the impact on deployment and performance?

Key factors include domain boundaries, data ownership, and team autonomy. Identify cohesive business capabilities that can be isolated; each microservice should own its data and expose a clear API. Evaluate the cost of inter‑service communication: network latency, serialization, and error handling can degrade performance. Consider deployment frequency: microservices enable independent releases but increase operational complexity. Assess the existing CI/CD pipeline’s ability to handle multiple services, including automated testing and rollback strategies. Look at scalability needs: services that experience traffic spikes can be scaled independently, improving overall performance. Examine consistency requirements: if strong consistency is needed across services, you may need distributed transactions or sagas, which add complexity. Finally, perform a risk‑benefit analysis: estimate the effort to split, refactor, and maintain services versus the expected gains in agility, scalability, and fault isolation. Pilot the split on a non‑critical domain to validate assumptions before a full migration.