What is monolith architecture?
Before microservices, most applications had been developed on monolith architecture. Even now, the number of applications and websites using monolith architecture is still higher than microservices. So what is monolith architecture?
The word “monolith” is often attributed to something large, which is not far from the truth of a monolith architecture for software design. A monolith architecture is built as a unified unit that is self-contained and independent from other applications.
With monolithic architectures, all processes are tightly coupled and run as a single service. That means the entire architecture must scale if only one application process experiences a spike in demand. Adding or improving a monolithic application’s features becomes more complex as the code base grows. This complexity limits experimentation and makes it challenging to implement new ideas. Monolithic architectures add risk to application availability because many dependent and tightly coupled processes increase the impact of a single process failure.
Monoliths can be convenient early on in an application’s life for ease of code management, cognitive overhead, and development. This allows everything in the monolith to be released at once.
What is microservices architecture?
The concept of microservices is where software is composed of small independent services that communicate with each other. Services are built for business capabilities and each service performs a single function. Because they are independently run, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet the demand for specific functions of an application. Each component service in a microservices architecture can be developed, deployed, operated, and scaled without affecting the functioning of other services.
Should you migrate to microservices architecture?
Organizations can benefit from either a monolith or microservices architecture, depending on a number of different factors. When developing using a monolith architecture, the primary advantage is fast development speed due to the simplicity of having an application based on one code base. However, as we mentioned above, it becomes more and more challenging when the project grows.
Therefore, to answer this question, you should learn more about advantages and disadvantages of microservices architecture and then, deciding yourself whether moving your system or not.
Advantages of microservices architecture
Flexible scalability
Scalability is the key benefit of microservices, compared with other software architecture. Microservices allow each service to be independently scaled to meet the demand for the application feature it supports. This enables teams to right-size infrastructure needs, accurately measure the cost of a feature, and maintain availability if a service experiences a spike in demand. Each service is designed for a set of capabilities and focuses on solving a specific problem. If developers contribute more code to a service over time and the service becomes complex, it can be broken into more minor services.
Easy deployment
Microservices foster an organization of small, independent teams that take ownership of their services. Teams act within a small and well-understood context and are empowered to work more independently and more quickly
Microservices enable continuous integration and delivery, making it easy to try out new ideas and roll back if something doesn’t work. The low cost of failure encourages experimentation, makes it easier to update code, and accelerates time-to-market for new features.
Resilience
Service independence increases an application’s resistance to failure. In a monolithic architecture, if a single component fails, it can cause the entire application to fail. With microservices, applications handle total service failure by degrading functionality and not crashing the entire application.
Disadvantages of microservices
With all those advantages, microservices architecture is considered highly optimal for software development. But … is there any disadvantages of Microservices architecture?
Microservices architecture encourages software developers to break down each function into a service. Therefore, a microservices system can contain thousands of services in practice. Without management tools, it is more difficult to control the operation of microservices compared to monolith architecture.
Microservices systems can contain thousands of services in practice. Therefore, without management tools, it is more difficult to control the operation of services compared to monolith architecture. In addition, the developer also needs to pay attention to the appropriate communication method between services.
Sunteco introduces a scalable application platform called Sunteco Cloud, which helps to deploy, operate, manage and transform from traditional on-premises/ monolith to modern cloud/ microservices architecture.
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Huong Nguyen (Sarah)
Digital Specialist
I am a Digital Specialist on Sunteco | Get blogs and the latest technology news and other cool stuff related to the (Container | Messaging | VM).
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