Monolithic vs Microservices: Pros, Cons, and what should you use?

A monolithic app operates in one unit, so testing it is much faster than microservice architecture. Microservices are a new version of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). These are small, independently deployable services modeled around complex applications. We’ve spoken about how monolithic technology can be hard to update and scale. Because of each function’s loose coupling, it’s easy to optimize, test, debug, and fix functions independently of one another.

monolithic vs microservices pros and cons

Because monolithic architecture software is tightly coupled, it can be hard to scale. As your codebase grows and/or you want to add new features, you need to drag the entire architecture up with you. Making the right decision of which architecture to choose depends on several factors. However, there are specific considerations you should look into before making the final decision. While monoliths follow the traditional deployments, microservices have given the system architects a tough time designing the deployment strategy.

Advantages of the Monolithic Architecture

If you want to create a complicated application, in addition to having the necessary knowledge you should be prepared for many kinds of expenses. Alternatively, monolithic vs microservices pros and cons monolithic architectures work well for lightweight development. A monolith consists of only one server where all calls and processes occur.

  • Microservices are also useful if you need to stream and process a lot of data in real-time.
  • With microservices, you can deploy individual services independently, making it much easier to roll out new features or updates.
  • These problems can be solved by using microservices architecture in parity with containers.
  • Even if you only want to boost or alter a single function, the entire application needs changing.
  • The smaller applications are deployed on different server instances, hosts of shared servers and function as a service platform depending on the requirement of a web application.

We created our own dashboard to view all migrations effectively in real time. The right tools are essential when undergoing a microserivces migration. We didn’t migrate customers right away, but rather first invested and created tools for the migration, knowing it was a marathon instead of a sprint. The most important tool we built was Microscope, our own internal service catalog to track all the microservices. Every developer at Atlassian can use Microscope to see all the information of any microservice in the company. Debugging challenges – Each microservice has its own set of logs, which makes debugging more complicated.

Conditions for Using Monoliths

Depending on what you need, either monolithic or microservice architecture could be the key to unlocking your organization’s potential. Microservices may look right in all aspects, but they pose risks to the business. Many efforts and human hours can go to waste if you scale those parts that are not required now. The critical business risk is the misplaced effort that can arise due to vertical/horizontal scaling of microservices. Since the entire code base is broken down into smaller services, it is relatively better organized.

Make sure you log all places of control transferring, especially if your application contains payment mechanisms, to be able to recover what has happened. Let’s recall what Ruby on Rails is out of the box in general, what it can offer, its advantages and disadvantages. If one part of the application fails with a monolith, the entire system may go down. From the above example, it is evident that the execution of Microservice architecture is complex and requires extensive planning. The core definition of microservice is that the services need to be physically separated. In the rapidly evolving world of eCommerce, staying ahead of the competition requires businesses to quickly adapt to changing market dynamics.

Microservices vs. monolithic architecture

Software companies organize themselves into small, cross-functional teams. To improve their processes and ship features fast, they adopt best CI/CD processes. The SMS is not coupled with the APP and if we need to exclude it from our project it will even be possible to delete it from our test_rails_backend directory, and nothing will change. The APP will just pass the data to Redis after users are created and that’s all. The data will not be processed by the SMS service, but nothing will be broken.

With a large infrastructure migration with a lot of people involved, the business wants to know about the return on investment, said Mike Tria, Head of Platform at Atlassian. It’s very important to keep up communications with the executive team, stakeholders, customers, partners, and the rest of the R&D teams. With Vertigo, we built a common functionality that would power our existing products and future products we acquire and build. If you are a single product company, microservices may not be necessary. Flexible scaling – If a microservice reaches its load capacity, new instances of that service can rapidly be deployed to the accompanying cluster to help relieve pressure.

The pros of monolithic architecture:

Since all the services in microservice architecture work independently, any error or fault affects only a specific service, not the entire application. That’s why adding new features and experimenting without the fear that it will break down the app is easier. The more small components there are, the easier it is to maintain an architecture. Moreover, microservices allow teams to experiment with the feature and roll back if something doesn’t work. Making the right architecture choice depends on several factors, particularly when it comes to management capabilities and developer expertise. Let’s examine the pros and cons of monolithic vs. microservices architecture.

monolithic vs microservices pros and cons

This is because a monolithic application can be developed and maintained by a smaller team and because it can potentially be easier to test and deploy. The term monolith comes from an ancient representation of a huge rock. When we talk about software, monoliths are nothing but a large https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ block of codes having multiple modules. The application and the business logic is encapsulated in a single deployable binary called a monolith. Usually, a monolith consists of a conventional three-tier architecture, namely, a database, a user interface, and a server-side application.

Microservice architecture pros

As you add new features and changes to the same code base, it will grow over time. The structure lends itself well to small teams and offers advantages like less operational overhead and focus. Monolith usually has a server-side application, front-end user interface and a single database. All functions are managed and served in one place, and that leads to big benefits. Microservices offer both business and technical performance-related advantages over traditional monolithic architectures.

monolithic vs microservices pros and cons

As a listener, our microservice gets all information that is produced in this Redis channel, then parses the received data and we initialize the SMS object from this parsed data. To make this happen, we should receive a type, phone of recipient, and username. For example, we almost always use Redis in our application from the very beginning, thus it is also possible to use it as a message bus, so that we don’t have to integrate any other services. However, with the application growth we should think about solutions like RabbitMQ which are more appropriate for cases like ours. Now you have the main app and you know how it will communicate with your microservice.

How to Choose Best Microservice Frameworks for eCommerce Business

For a long time, the cost, time, and complexity of provisioning new hardware have unequivocally impacted application development. In a true microservice architecture, each service would be running in its process or container, communicating with each other through APIs. This allows for more flexibility and scalability, as each service can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. In general, microservices architectures are more suitable for large-scale, complex, and distributed applications that must be agile, scalable, and resilient. Monolithic architectures, on the other hand, are more suitable for small-scale, simple, and standalone applications that need to be stable, reliable, and efficient. The advantage of microservices architecture in terms of testing is that teams can test faster and more frequently, using varying tools and frameworks.

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