Transition from a legacy monolith to a scalable microservices architecture
Monolithic systems might feel stable, but in reality, they slow you down. They’re heavy, resistant to change, and hold back innovation. DivBrands understood this when Gus Fune, their CTO, came onboard in 2021 and faced an outdated PHP backend clinging to an old WordPress fork. Every update required effort that wasn’t sustainable. It was obvious, rip it out or stay stuck.
They chose growth. Over one holiday break, Gus sketched a proof of concept. In the months that followed, they rebuilt the core infrastructure several times. Not to perfect it from day one, but to move. They built quickly, broke things, and kept going. The result was a complete shift from a frozen monolith to a lightweight, scalable architecture based on MACH, microservices, APIs, cloud-native environments, and headless front ends.
Each service within the new system has a clear boundary. It runs independently, so developers take ownership of specific areas. They move faster. They ship updates without waiting for authorization chains or centralized gates. That’s speed and responsibility combined, not an easy balance, but critical if you want to scale innovation without sacrificing control.
With this architecture, DivBrands now operates 40 discrete services across e-commerce capabilities. Every function, payments, logistics, checkout, is powered by focused services that can be deployed or rebuilt at will. You don’t rebuild your entire system just to test a small change. That is the flexibility modern digital environments require.
Decoupled microservices prevent revenue loss during outages
Here’s the thing about eCommerce at scale, downtime kills revenue. Ten years ago, companies bragged when traffic overloaded a server. Today, if your system can’t stay online when it matters, you lose the sale. That’s inefficient. It’s also unnecessary.
DivBrands saw this firsthand. During a routine update, they made a database error that took out a key service. It was offline for nine hours. But here’s the important part: customers never stopped placing orders. The architecture let the system continue functioning, even with one part disconnected. Confirmation emails were delayed. That’s it.
This is what decoupling really gives you. Fault tolerance. Not total resistance to failure, which is impossible. But the ability to absorb a hit and keep running. Each microservice runs separately. If one drops, it doesn’t collapse everything. That’s a smart system design, built not just for uptime, but for resilience when things go wrong.
For a leadership team, this means uninterrupted revenue, even during technical breakdowns. It also means you’re not spending weeks cleaning up after a single service fails. You isolate problems and solve them without damaging the customer experience. And in ecommerce, that’s where you win or lose.
Gus Fune, CTO at DivBrands, nailed it when he said, “It’s easier to maintain when things aren’t as intertwined.” That’s the thinking C-suite leaders need to adopt. This isn’t just an engineering decision. It’s a business strategy. If your systems are built to survive pressure, your revenue is too.
Developer empowerment and asynchronous collaboration enhance efficiency
Smart systems require smart teams. At DivBrands, Gus Fune, the CTO, didn’t just change the tech stack, he rebuilt how the engineering team operates. Traditional workflows built on tightly controlled meetings and hand-holding don’t scale well in a microservices environment. Instead, Fune designed a developer culture that runs on ownership, visibility, and trust.
Each engineer owns a microservice. They’re responsible for building, deploying, and maintaining it. There are no daily standups, no unnecessary sync calls. Nearly all collaboration is asynchronous. Developers have access to real-time observability tools, performance metrics, and error logs. They don’t need to wait for someone to tell them what’s broken, they have the data in front of them.
That speeds you up. It creates a loop of continuous shipping, adjusting, and improving. Fune calls it hands-off leadership, but it’s more accurate to say it’s focused leadership. Intervene only when someone’s stuck or heading down the wrong path. Otherwise, you let smart people do what you hired them to do.
Executives thinking about scaling engineering capacity need to think this way. You can’t build velocity through oversight. If your developers need permission every time they want to act, you’ve already created a bottleneck. Give people access, give them clear ownership, and step back. You’ll see progress, not just processes.
Automation and DevOps literacy are critical for managing complexity
When you dismantle a monolith in favor of distributed services, the hidden cost is complexity. Dividing functionality across dozens of services brings orchestration, deployment, and monitoring challenges that can quickly overwhelm your team, unless you plan for it early. That’s where automation and DevOps fundamentals come in.
Gus Fune is direct on this point: “Try to automate the infrastructure layer, with infrastructure-as-code, Terraform, or Pulumi, as early as possible.” Without that, services become harder to manage with each new addition. Documentation gets buried. Manual deployments cause delays. Small mistakes scale up quickly across the system.
Infrastructure-as-code solves that by defining system behavior precisely and making changes predictable and trackable. It standardizes how services are deployed and reduces the risk of shadow infrastructure that no one understands. Pair this with developers who have working knowledge of containerization, monitoring, and site reliability principles, and you get a team capable of operating fully modern cloud-native systems.
Fune recommends developers who are “pi-shaped”, broad in general experience and specialized in at least two technical areas. DevOps is one of them. This kind of versatility helps teams solve infrastructure problems directly, without bouncing issues between departments.
For a leadership team, the takeaway is straightforward: invest in automation early, and upskill your teams where it matters. These are not support functions, they’re core to your product’s reliability and speed. If you don’t fix this upfront, the costs and delays compound later.
Continuous optimization drives performance improvements
Upgrading to microservices doesn’t mean the work is done. It means you’ve created a system that can evolve constantly. At DivBrands, that’s exactly how Gus Fune and his team operate. They don’t wait for milestones or end-of-quarter reviews to improve performance. Optimization happens as part of everyday development.
That mindset led to a major performance gain recently, reducing the payments-to-orders processing time from 30 seconds to just two. In a commerce environment where every second counts, that kind of refinement directly impacts conversion and customer satisfaction. But it wasn’t planned in advance. It emerged from continuous monitoring and a culture of iteration.
Fune is clear that MACH architecture isn’t fixed. It’s a framework meant for movement. Composable services are built to be reviewed, refined, and sometimes replaced. His team is constantly tweaking performance, eliminating lag, collapsing redundant steps, and improving systems already in use.
For executives, this approach delivers measurable advantages. Systems stay lean. Latency drops. Business logic stays aligned with market expectations. By embedding performance thinking directly into the workflow rather than setting it aside as a secondary phase, DivBrands keeps its stack sharp, and its customer experience fast.
If you’re running composable commerce, this isn’t optional. Continuous improvement is the only way to compete against businesses that do it by default. You don’t need to optimize everything at once. But you do need to keep going.
Long-Term value outweighs the increased operational costs of microservices
Microservices aren’t cheap. You’ll pay more upfront, compute, networking, tooling, all of it scales linearly with the number of services you run. At DivBrands, they see that clearly. But Gus Fune doesn’t hesitate to say the investment is worth it.
Running independent modules drives up visible cost, but hides very few inefficiencies. What was once buried in the monolith as technical debt becomes visible, and solvable. Because each service stands alone, outages don’t spread. Maintenance is broken down into smaller, manageable scopes. Engineers don’t waste time navigating systems they don’t own.
More importantly, the productivity benefit compounds. Developers specialize. They get to learn their specific service inside out. And when services share functionality, say, across checkout and payment flows, the team extracts it into a shared library. “Build it once, and it becomes part of our toolset,” Fune says. That’s cross-service efficiency you don’t get when everything is packed into one platform.
There’s also a long-term strategic angle. A modular system allows for independent scaling. You put resources only where needed. Whether it’s infrastructure or expertise, you move intentionally instead of reacting to fire drills.
For C-suite leaders, the message is simple: cost should never be viewed narrowly. Yes, you’ll see new line items. But the return comes in agility, developer speed, reduced incident impact, and ultimately, faster value delivery. The bill is higher, but the waste is lower. That’s how you scale serious technology.
Enhanced agility permits rapid feature deployments in e-commerce
Speed matters. Especially in e-commerce, where change happens fast, seasonal demand, shifting consumer behavior, new channels, and platform updates all shape how quickly you’re able to deliver. At DivBrands, Gus Fune built a system that doesn’t slow down when stakes are high. Their in-house microservices architecture is designed for rapid deployment, fast rollback, and continuous testing.
This flexibility allows DivBrands to spin up, test, and refine new services on their terms. There’s no need to wait for legacy ERP system compatibility or monolithic constraints. If the business team wants to try something new, different pricing logic, checkout flow, or shipping method, it can be built and deployed in isolation. The decision to ship becomes smaller, faster, and easier to validate.
For high-velocity environments like end-of-year holiday sales, this becomes crucial. Developers don’t need to bet everything on broad, interdependent system changes. Instead, they tune the services that matter most. Systems like payment orchestration, inventory tracking, or order placement can adapt independently to load and logic changes without risking upstream or downstream failures.
This helps retain what Fune refers to as “startup agility”, the ability to experiment, test, and scale without waiting for systems to catch up. And that agility isn’t about size or company age. It’s about design. If your architecture supports change, your business does too.
For C-suite executives, this isn’t just a technical benefit, it’s a strategic enabler. When IT no longer blocks new ideas, business teams move faster. Time-to-market improves. Experimentation increases. And when ideas fail, the cost of learning drops. Velocity, reliability, and controlled iteration don’t come from large IT budgets, they come from flexible platforms that adapt in real time. DivBrands built one. Others should pay attention.
Final thoughts
Speed, stability, and adaptability aren’t technical preferences, they’re business requirements. If you’re still running on legacy architecture, you’re operating with limitations built in.
Microservices, when done right, give you clarity in ownership, flexibility in delivery, and continuity in the face of failure. That doesn’t come free. You’ll pay in complexity, infrastructure cost, and skill ramp-up. But the trade-off is strategic control, across performance, product cycles, and talent.
What DivBrands shows is that MACH isn’t an abstract framework, it’s a set of engineering decisions that support how the business moves. Modular systems allow teams to execute faster, recover smarter, and adapt without friction. That’s how innovation scales.
If you’re serious about resilience and velocity, it starts with unblocking your architecture. The upside is already on the table. Now it’s about building the systems to reach it.
