# How to build a monolith the right way Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops/how-to-build-a-monolith-the-right-way Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops/how-to-build-a-monolith-the-right-way.md Podcast: [Adventures in DevOps](https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops) Published: 2026-04-24T00:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/270-ci-cd-building-monoliths-the-right-way Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71618548/download.mp3 Processing state: failed JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/adventures-in-devops/episodes/how-to-build-a-monolith-the-right-way Duration seconds: 2702 ## Resource Share Episode                     We sit down with Ian Duncan, senior staff engineer on the stability team at Mercury, to discuss the delicate balance of choosing your tech stack and the implications. That means explore the concept of the novelty budget or frequently known as "Choose Boring Technology". It emphasizes why companies should carefully spend their innovation tokens on things that actually move the needle, rather than reinventing the wheel.           Mercury leverages simple technology like Postgres and EC2 instances alongside high-innovation bets like Haskell and Nix to maintain stability. The conversation unpacks the hidden complexities of over-relying on standard tools, sharing a cautionary tale about using a Postgres table as a massive queuing system until it consumed all the database resources and caused login failures. To solve architectural scaling without descending into nanoservice madness, we jump to discussing monolithic build systems. By leveraging hermetically sealed, modular build targets, teams can achieve massive parallelism and avoid endless local rebuilds while maintaining a single coherent view of the codebase.           We also advocate for separating management tools from primary systems by utilizing dedicated control planes, and touch on the rising popularity of durable execution frameworks like Temporal to handle resilient workflows. And it turns out Ian might be a bigger advocate of microservices that he thought!           💡 Notable Links:           Ian's blog Book: Bla… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/adventures-in-devops/episodes/how-to-build-a-monolith-the-right-way/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops/how-to-build-a-monolith-the-right-way.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.