Explain advanced service decomposition anti-patterns and how to detect a distributed monolith in PHP microservices architecture.

A distributed monolith occurs when microservices are tightly coupled through synchronous calls, shared databases, and coordinated deployments, eliminating the benefits of microservices.

A distributed monolith is one of the most common failure modes in microservice architectures built with PHP or any backend stack. It looks like microservices on the surface but behaves like a monolith under the hood.

Core characteristics:

Services depend heavily on HTTP calls for every operation.

Multiple services directly read/write the same tables.

Services must be deployed together to avoid breaking compatibility.

Failure in one service cascades across the system.

5.…