.NET application framework + architecture practice
Cleavestack scaffolds a modular monolith your team can ship this quarter, and enforces the boundaries that let you extract microservices later. No rewrite. The exit is built in from the first commit.
The name
cleave
verb · Old English clifian
to adhere firmly; to cling together
Your modules share one process, one deploy, one debugger, one pull request. Monolith speed while you find the product.
cleave
verb · Old English cleofan
to split cleanly, along a natural plane
When one module needs its own scale, team, or release cadence, it leaves as a service. Along prepared lines, not a tear.
"Cleave" is one of English's few contronyms: it means both things at once, and so does your architecture. A stonemason does not smash rock; a clean cleave follows the plane the material already has. Cleavestack builds those planes into your codebase from day one.
Why teams pick it
Microservices on day one distribute a system nobody understands yet. An unstructured monolith collapses into the big ball of mud. Both roads end in a rewrite. Cleavestack is the third road.
One template scaffolds a warning-free solution: DDD aggregates, CQRS with a decorator pipeline, a transactional outbox, and Aspire orchestration, all wired. Fifteen packages, one lockstep version.
Module isolation is not a convention on a wiki. Ninety-three architecture fitness tests and a compile-time layer guard reject the violating commit. Seventy ADRs record why every rule exists.
Database-per-module, events through an outbox, transport at the edge, gRPC contracts, JWKS auth. A module becomes its own service by composition change. Proven under live conference traffic on Azure.
How it works
One command writes the solution: five layers, tests, migrations, local orchestration with SQL Server in a container. Green before you touch it.
Add modules and vertical slices with their own templates. The fitness tests keep every module extractable while the team ships features.
Promote a module to its own service host behind the gateway. Events keep flowing through the outbox; auth keeps working over JWKS. The domain never hears about it.
Services
Every engagement runs on the same public rubric and the same evidence standard the framework applies to itself.
Your .NET estate scored against the public 34-category rubric, on two axes, with cited evidence and a prioritized remediation plan. The same scorecard the framework publishes about itself.
Fixed fee · 2 weeksDDD, Clean Architecture, and CQRS taught hands-on: your engineers build a real module end to end on the framework, and leave with it running.
Fixed fee · 2-3 days, on site or remoteEmbedded architecture guidance: adopt the framework, shape modules on real domain boundaries, and run your first extraction with a hand on the rail.
Retainer or time and materialsOpen source
Cleavestack is the commercial home of MMCA, the open-source modular monolith framework for .NET. Everything the services teach is public: the packages, the reference apps, the ADRs, and the scorecards that grade them.