“Which framework should we migrate to?”
The better first question is:
“What exactly are we dealing with?”
A mature PHP system can contain years of assumptions that are not obvious from looking at a few controllers.
Load balancers.
More servers.
Redis.
Read replicas.
Kubernetes.
Queues.
CDNs.
Those things matter.
Global state is convenient.
That is why it survives.
A static singleton is easy to reach.
A global helper saves a few lines.
A shared container gives you access to almost anything.
A lot of systems say they have observability because they have logs.
They do not.
Logs are useful, sometimes essential, but they are only one part of understanding what a system is actually doing.
A system can produce thousands of log lines every minute and still be nearly impossible to diagnose when something goes wrong.
A framework is supposed to help you build faster.
Routing, dependency injection, database access, queues, validation, authentication, caching, testing support—good frameworks remove huge amounts of repetitive work.
But there is another question I think framework design should take seriously:
What happens when the application eventually needs to move beyond the framework?
That might sound strange.
They are built to solve the immediate problem.
Ship the product.
Get users.
Add features.
Then, somewhere along the way, the application becomes important enough that replacing it is no longer simple.
You can have clear business boundaries, independent modules, explicit contracts, good tests, background workers, queues, caching, horizontal scaling and strong deployment automation without splitting the application into separate services.
So at what point should one of those modules actually become a microservice?
EvolvePHP 2.0.0-alpha.1 is officially out.
Until now, most of what I have written about EvolvePHP has focused on architecture: modular applications, execution isolation, long-running PHP, modernization, Bridge, service lifetimes and designing software for change.
With this release, those ideas are no longer only plans.
There is now a tagged, testable EvolvePHP 2 Alpha.
Start with a monolith.
Grow.
Split into services.
Become “modern.”
I think that framing is backwards.
Microservices are not the goal.
Boot the application once.
Keep the process alive.
Handle many requests or jobs.
Avoid repeating expensive initialization.
That can absolutely improve performance.
