I work on a monolith with ~1500 developers and it works pretty great.
The secret is that you're able to break a monolith apart, just like you can with microservices. You have APIs and modules of the monolith are responsible for their own thing. APIs are your contracts, just like in a microservice architecture.
The difference is that you can check if APIs are broken at compile time. In addition, you can view the API right in your IDE. In addition, your API isn't returning wishy-washy json with a half-assed OpenAPI spec - it's returning real types in a full-featured type system. And, cherry on top - you don't have to communicate over the network. Oh my god, you don't realize how many bugs and thousands of hours are wasted just working around that until you no longer have to. It's an immediate productivity boost.
But the best part is probably deployments. It's just so, so much more straightforward with one codebase.
The secret is that you're able to break a monolith apart, just like you can with microservices. You have APIs and modules of the monolith are responsible for their own thing. APIs are your contracts, just like in a microservice architecture.
The difference is that you can check if APIs are broken at compile time. In addition, you can view the API right in your IDE. In addition, your API isn't returning wishy-washy json with a half-assed OpenAPI spec - it's returning real types in a full-featured type system. And, cherry on top - you don't have to communicate over the network. Oh my god, you don't realize how many bugs and thousands of hours are wasted just working around that until you no longer have to. It's an immediate productivity boost.
But the best part is probably deployments. It's just so, so much more straightforward with one codebase.