You've broken your monolith into six services. They deploy independently. They have separate repos. And yet — one "simple" business operation touches four of them synchronously, shares a database, and when service C fails, services A and B are left in an inconsistent state. Congratulations. You have a distributed monolith. It has all the operational complexity of microservices and all the coupling of a monolith. It is strictly worse than either. I've been building enterprise Java systems since 2009. This pattern has killed more modernization projects than any technical decision about frameworks or cloud providers. Here's what it actually is and how to fix it. What Makes Something a Distributed Monolith The tell is in the transaction semantics, not the deployment topology. Symptom 1: Shared database, multiple services.…