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Monolithic vs. microservices architectures

Advantages and disadvantages of the most common software architecture patterns

technologysoftware architecture
7 Mar 2023
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⚡ Tl;dr

🚀 Let’s kick-off

Since microservices architectures entered the scene and become popular in the early 2010s, there’s been an ongoing debate about whether they are better than traditional monolithic architecture patterns. Big tech companies like Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, eBay and Uber have switched to microservices, but does that mean you should too? Let’s explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of monolithic vs. microservice architectures.

📦 Monoliths

A monolithic application is a software application compiled into a single executable, usually stored in a single source control repository. Traditionally, most applications were developed as monoliths, but today it’s seen as a way to quickly get up and running with a simple codebase in the early days of launching a new product. Even though they may be seen as “uncool”, monolithic architectures are the best place to start when developing a new system or in an organization that’s still relatively small.

Monoliths consist of a 3 tier architecture, which includes the following:

Monolithic architecture!

👍 Benefits of monolithic architectures

👎 Disadvantages of monolithic architectures

🧩 Microservices

Microservice architectures include a series of independently developed and deployable services. They are loosely coupled with separate responsibilities and concerns. Each microservice can have a dedicated source control repository or be part of a larger mono repo. This type of architecture is more appropriate for mature products running at a larger scale or in organizations with many teams and developers.

The biggest consideration for these architectures is how the services interact with each other to fulfill an end-to-end user request. An event bus such as RabbitMQ or Kafka is often used as a communication layer between lots of services. Each microservice usually defines an API specification that describes how it can be interacted with by other services.

Microservice architecture!

👍 Benefits of microservice architectures

👎 Disadvantages of microservice architectures

🏁 To wrap up

As with most things in software, there is no right or wrong answer here. Make sure to weigh the pros, cons and compromises for either approach to make the best decision. Consider the company stage and product stage you’re at and have a plan if you hope to switch from a monolithic to a microservice architecture.

Leave a comment if you have any extra points to add!

Stay chill 🧊

Victor

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