"The dirty secret of the microservices movement is the heavy operational burden of service provisioning, discovery and interface specification. For many applications, e.g. those with logically grouped activities or that require single-tenant deployment, microservices are a “bridge too far.” In-place refactoring of monolithic applications with service-oriented architecture presents a 3rd-way between monoliths and microservices. OpenAPI provides the API specification and the supporting tooling ecosystem to define sensible service boundaries at the API-layer, substantially de-risking monolith refactors. We present a “war story”, targeted at software architects and developers, detailing the design and implementation considerations that allowed us to use OpenAPI to “break” our monolithic code-base into sensible services to support our life-sciences partners."