I spent the last 6 months migrating our monolith to microservices. Here's what I wish someone had told me before we started.

Start with a strangler fig pattern. Don't rewrite — extract. Pick the least-coupled domain first and route traffic gradually. We chose billing and had zero downtime during the switch.

The hardest part isn't the code — it's the data. Shared databases between services will haunt you. Invest in event-driven synchronization early, even if it feels like overkill.