These days, it’s hard to argue with the fact that the quality and functionality of an application also directly affect the economic growth of your company. Depending on your business needs, you can build an application with either a monolithic or a microservices architecture. Monolithic architecture used to be preferred, but in recent years many companies are moving to microservices. Let’s try to figure out why this happens and weigh the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches.
The essence of both architectures
When working on applications, each developer deals with the architectural specifications. In previous generations, most software companies designed purely monolithic applications. “Monolith” in any professional field means something that comes as one piece, which also makes sense for applications. Therefore, a monolithic application is a single-level software, autonomous and independent of other computer applications. It combines the user interface and the data access code in a single program on a separate platform and works as an indivisible unit.
As for microservices, the application structure is more complex. Here, the application looks like a collection of small, isolated units that run each process as a separate service. All services perform their particular functions, have their own logic and database.
Monolithic vs microservices: which is better?
Monolithic vs microservices? Many loudly declare: monolithic applications are a thing of the past. However, they still have advantages to consider before deciding on the application architecture.
First, monolithic applications are easy to develop because obviously any engineering team has many years of experience building these traditional applications. Second, they are easy to implement, since you only need to handle one file and copy the application to a server. Finally, comprehensive testing and bug fixing is also much faster.
Why is this approach losing favor? Probably, due to the difficulty of climbing. If one function fails, the entire application will crash, leaving customers highly dissatisfied. If you plan a system upgrade, be prepared to redeploy the app. Another possible scenario is when the demand for a particular feature grows, developers have to increase the resource limits for the entire application, not just for a specific feature.
A reasonable solution to these problems would be a transition to a microservices architecture. Since this type of architecture involves isolated and independent functions that run in their own containers, any one of them can be scaled and updated without affecting the entire application.
The microservices architecture is also easier to understand because developers can break the application into smaller components and work on them separately. Your business objectives determine which features are essential, and the engineering team pays close attention when designing them.
The microservices architecture is also not without its drawbacks. As a distributed system, all services must be implemented separately. Developers have to choose how to connect stand-alone modules and databases and manage the process carefully.
Although microservices give you the freedom to try different technologies and innovations within your application, it’s important not to overdo it here. One piece of advice: keep your application under strict control and implement standardized approaches, languages, and layouts. These actions will allow you to maintain the integrity of your application and increase the flow of customers.
Moving on to microservices
Modern requirements, the increasing flow of users, and the drive to innovate have led to a massive shift from traditional monolithic application methods to microservices architecture design. The changes have already been adopted by both small businesses and large companies. Netflix, Uber, Amazon, SoundCloud, and Spotify are just a few of them. Netflix, for example, was at the forefront of early adopters of the microservices architecture.
Despite the widespread opinion that monolithic architecture is dying and microservices are a must for all businesses, we strongly recommend that you carefully research and evaluate each type of architecture. If you have a small team, are a startup company, and want to launch your app faster, a monolithic architecture may be enough to achieve your business goals.
To implement microservices, you need multiple teams of competent experts who can build a large application with many modules and features. With enough resources and a detailed plan, you can upgrade to a microservices architecture.
You now have more information at your disposal to decide where you stand in today’s monolithic versus microservices dilemma.
