Monolithic vs Microservices – Which one will you choose?

I always find it interesting to speak with people who have a strong opinion whether Microservices or Monolithic apps are better. When I ask them why they feel so strongly about it, they usually say that the company they used to work for had a bad experience with either one of them. I think that this is a flawed way of looking at it because both microservices and monolithic apps have their pros and cons and there is no silver bullet. We need to look at the context of the project to decide what architecture would work best.

The goal in this article is not to convince you that one is better than the other, but rather to present some considerations that we should take into account when we choose between them. We will talk about both the architectures and some key differences between them.

Monolithic Architechture

Monolithic architecture is the traditional unified model of software development.

In this type of architecture, all the aspects of the software are interwoven into a single application. The various components of the application communicate with each other through function calls or via a shared database. This approach has been around for a long time and is still prevalent in many legacy enterprises.

Microservices architecture is relatively new and came about as enterprise systems. It has started to become more complex and their development more challenging. In this architecture, the functionality of large applications is split into small services. These service interact with each other via APIs.

Monoliths dominate our software landscape, and they do so for a reason. Monoliths are easy to develop and understand. They are easier to test and maintain. It’s significantly easier to deploy new versions of a monolith than it is to deploy many independent services.

More importantly, monoliths are easier to reason about as your application grows and becomes more complex. Unlike microservices, monolithic applications keep all their code in one place. And unlike with microservices, you can’t introduce an issue into your application by simply adding or changing an external dependency.

So what’s not to love?

Well, nothing. Unless you need scalability or resilience, or if your organisation has significant engineering resources at its disposal (or both). In that case, microservices may be a viable option for managing the complexity of your application as it grows over time.

The major benefits of the monolithic architecture include:

• Quick development and deployment with less moving parts
• Easy collaboration between developers on a team sharing the same codebase
• Easier testing because each developer can run tests against their local instance of the application

Microservices Architecture

One of the most important decisions you’ll make when building a microservices architecture is to choose between monolithic and micro-service databases. For many teams, this decision can be confusing. Because it’s easy to get distracted by questions about the differences between microservices and monoliths. Also, by concerns about the consistency model of a distributed database.

In order to make this decision, you need to understand what happens when a request arrives at your system. This article will show you how to think about that process in order to choose the right type of database for your use case.

Many different services interact with each other and build a microservices-based system. Each service will probably have its own database, which means that your application will need a way to access data stored in multiple databases.

For example, consider an e-commerce app where users can browse products and make purchases. The product catalog, user authentication service, shopping cart and checkout services would all need access to data in both their own databases and in other services’ databases. (Note by this example I meant to be illustrative, not comprehensive.)

Advantages of Microservices

• As the complexity of an application increases, it becomes harder and harder to develop and test the application as a single unit. This is where microservices shine – they provide a better way to manage complex applications.
• Microservices make it easier for developers to work on different parts of the application separately without affecting other parts. This means that developers can work on different parts of the app without having to worry about breaking other parts
• Fully automated deployment tools deploy microservices independently. There is no human intervention required for any step of deployment. This makes deployments rapid, frequent and reliable.
• Microservices communicate with each other through APIs calls. It is easier to write API calls than to write inter-process communication code (like RPC) which makes integrating different parts easier and less error prone.

However, for all their advantages, microservices also pose certain challenges:

The main disadvantage of microservices is that they require more time to develop, which can be costly for some companies. Microservices can also be difficult to manage with large teams, which is why it’s important to have a good development process in place.

Monolithic vs Microservices

Conclusion

We saw what are monolithic and microservices and the advantages and challenges associated with both of them. We also have listed key differences which can help us choose which type of architecture we want to choose to create an app or a business.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comment section below and share your experiences with either or both of the architechtures. For more such articles, visit DevOps Pod