KubeCon featured a discussion on cloud-native architecture, examining the challenges and benefits of monoliths and microservices. Grafana Labs engineers Goutham Veeramachaneni and Edward Welch introduced the concept of "monomicroliths," which combine elements of both architectures to address scalability and simplicity issues. They highlighted the ease of developing monolithic applications but noted the complications that arise as businesses expand, necessitating a shift to microservices for better scalability. However, the complexity of managing numerous microservices can become overwhelming, leading to inefficiencies. The monomicrolith approach offers a solution by consolidating microservices into a single binary application that can scale horizontally and be managed easily, allowing for incremental development and simplified troubleshooting. This approach has been successfully applied to projects like Cortex, Thanos, and Loki, enhancing adoption and development processes. The strategy involves using modular code bases and gRPC for communication, retaining a monorepo structure for consistency, and balancing trade-offs in performance and flexibility, ultimately making the development process more seamless and gradual.