Monolithic or microservices? Choose the best option for your business

These days, it’s hard to argue with the fact that the quality and functionality of an application also directly affects the economic growth of your business. Depending on your business needs, you can build an application with monolithic or microservices architecture. Monolithic architecture used to be favored, but in recent years many companies are switching to microservices. Let’s try to find out why this happens and weigh the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches.

The essence of both architectures

When working on applications, each developer takes care of the architectural details. In previous generations, most software companies designed purely monolithic applications. “Monolith” in any professional field means something presented as a part, which also makes sense for applications. Therefore, a monolithic application is a single-level software, autonomous and independent from 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.

When it comes to 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 declare out loud: monolithic apps are a thing of the past. However, they still have advantages to consider before deciding on your application architecture.

First, monolithic applications are easy to develop because any engineering team obviously has many years of experience building these traditional applications. Second, they are easy to implement as you only need to handle one file and copy the application to a server. Finally, end-to-end testing and bug fixes are also much faster.

Why is this approach losing its supporters? Probably due to the difficulty of climbing. If a function fails, the entire application will crash leaving customers very dissatisfied. If you plan a system upgrade, be ready to redeploy the application. Another possible scenario is when demand for a particular feature grows, developers have to increase resource limits for the entire application, not just for a specific feature.

A reasonable solution to these problems would be a transition to a microservice architecture. Since this type of architecture involves isolated and independent features that run in their own containers, any of them can be scaled and upgraded without affecting the entire application.

The microservices architecture is also easier to understand because developers can divide the application into smaller components and work on them separately. Your business goals determine which features are essential, and the engineering team pays close attention when designing them.

The microservices architecture is not without its drawbacks, either. As a distributed system, all services must be implemented separately. Developers must choose how to connect standalone modules and databases and handle the process carefully.

Although microservices give you the freedom to test different technologies and innovations within your application, it is important not to overdo it here. One word of advice: keep your application under tight control and implement standardized approaches, languages, and design. These actions will allow you to maintain the integrity of your application and increase customer flow.

Move to microservices

Modern requirements, increasing user flow, and life for innovation have led to a massive shift from traditional monolithic application methods to microservices architecture design. The changes have already been adopted by both small 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 microservices architecture.

Despite the widespread opinion that monolithic architecture is dying and microservices are a must for every business, we strongly recommend that you carefully research and evaluate each type of architecture. If you have a small team, your company is a startup, and you want to launch your application faster, a monolithic architecture may be sufficient to achieve your business goals.

To implement microservices, you need several teams of competent experts who can create a great application with numerous modules and functions. With enough resources and a detailed plan, you can upgrade to a microservices architecture.

Now you have more information at your disposal to help you decide where you are in today’s monolithic dilemma versus microservices.