[deamanto]

I've tried searching this and couldn't find anything related to microservices - what is the factoring problem or system that grugbrain is referring to?

Is it something to do with calculating the cost of splitting off a monolith into a microservice vs. some other method?

[aahortwwy]

They are referring to software structure and decomposition.

This is a hard problem that spans architectures; you can have a poorly factored microservice architecture, just as you can have a poorly factored monolith.

These two posts from Shopify are good:

https://shopify.engineering/deconstructing-monolith-designin...

https://shopify.engineering/shopify-monolith

[kqr]

I think they are talking about modularisation, i.e. breaking the code into somewhat independent units.