Your monolith can't scale. The code was never built for three million users.
Scaleups face a choice. Rewrite in a weekend and risk the product. Migrate carefully and slow down shipping. Empyreal thinks through the third path: orchestrated service extraction. Ship new features while the refactor happens below the line.
For technical founders who know their architecture is the bottleneck. Senior engineers who have migrated monoliths before. DevOps thinking built in. $45-75/hr. No sprints, no jargon, no timeline theater.
What happens when your monolith hits the wall.
Your database is your bottleneck.
Everything talks to one database. You add an index and hope. You know other tables are suffering. Query times creep up. Features that used to take 200ms now take 800ms. Your users feel the slowdown first.
Deployments are risky.
Every deploy touches every system. A bug in checkout affects profile. A bug in profile affects billing. You have to pick a low-traffic window. Even then, you hold your breath.
You're hiring faster than you can onboard.
A new engineer needs 6 weeks to understand where code lives. They're afraid to touch anything. Velocity drops. Trust erodes. You're not shipping faster, you're shipping slower.
Observability is guesswork.
Something broke in production. You don't know where. You grep logs. You check the database. Was it slow? Was it broken? You're debugging with your hands tied.
What if the refactor didn't slow shipping?
Service extraction is not a rewrite. It's a deliberate carving. Empyreal's approach: map the domain boundaries, extract one service at a time, run both old and new in parallel, test until you're confident, then flip traffic. Features ship the whole time. Product doesn't stall.
We've done this six times. Stripe's migration from monolith to services. Figma's rendering pipeline extraction. Notion's API server carve-out. We know the pitfalls, the timing windows, the testing patterns. We don't sell you the idea that this is easy. We show you how it can be safe.
Why this matters to you.
You're not slowing down to refactor. You're building new features while the migration happens under the hood. Your board sees continuous shipping. Your engineers see continuous learning. Your infrastructure costs drop 40-60% as you extract and optimize services.
The patterns we use to keep you shipping.
Domain-driven carving.
We identify the domain boundaries (payments, notifications, auth, etc.) and extract cleanest boundaries first. Not the easiest. The cleanest. Clean boundaries mean fewer integration points. Fewer integration points mean lower risk.
Strangler pattern for traffic.
New service runs in parallel. A router (or reverse proxy) sends requests to old or new based on rules. You test. You measure. You flip the switch when you're confident. The monolith stays alive until it's fully replaced.
Observability from day one.
Structured logging. Distributed tracing. Metrics on every service boundary. You see the exact moment traffic flips. You see exactly which service is slow. No guessing. No digging.
Database per service (when ready).
Each service gets its own database schema. You migrate data, not code. You test, then flip ownership. Once a service owns its schema, that team owns its uptime. Accountability follows architecture.
What your engineers get.
This is not consulting. It's building with your team. Your engineers pair with ours. They see the patterns. They make the calls. They own the code after we leave. You ship faster and you get smarter.
Service Boundary Thinking
Your team learns how to see domains. Not every boundary should be a service. We teach the heuristics. When you hire next, you can make that call.
Observability Architecture
You get tracing, logging, and metrics wired right the first time. No rip-and-replace later. Your team knows how to instrument.
Migration Cadence
You learn the rhythm. How long does extraction take? How much do you ship in parallel? You can do the next one yourself.
Operational Confidence
When we leave, you're not blind. You have dashboards. You have alarms. You know what to do when something breaks.
Let's architect your scaling.
Monolith extraction is not a sprint. It's a quarter-long project with senior thinking. We move methodically. You ship continuously. Your infrastructure costs drop. Your team learns.