Monolithic vs Microservices architecture: what’s the difference and which to choose?

Lack of clear ownership – As more services are introduced, so are the number of teams running those services. Over time it becomes difficult to know the available services a team can leverage and who to contact for support. Debugging challenges – Each microservice has its own set of logs, which makes debugging more complicated. Plus, a single business process can run across multiple machines, further complicating debugging.

Since the code base is enormous, this retards the velocity of the development and testing cycle of the application. Complicated deployment.A large number of stand-alone services and connections between them require a greater effort from developers to deploy the app. Greater resource consumption.Microservices architecture often requires not only more effort but more development time and manpower, which may not suit some companies.

IT Service Management

Because decoupled applications can maintain standard performance under varying loads, they are more resilient and provide better user experiences. IBM in 2021 either “agree” or “agree completely” that microservices offer many benefits. Here are several questions to ask that will help you confirm whether microservices are used in your technology environment. With microservices, you have the flexibility to provision the exact infrastructure—no more, no less—that is required to support the unique function of each distinct service. For example, if the application has a large load, it is impossible to deploy the instances to the single part responsible for that, thus, more resources are needed which leads to inefficient processes.

As the name suggests, a “monolithic” architecture consists of indivisible units coupled together to handle different operations in the application. At Cisco Live 2023 Amsterdam, AppDynamics Cloud unveils support for hybrid clouds and now empowers teams to contextually explore traces to pinpoint service issues faster. Due to a single large codebase and tight coupling, the entire application would have to deploy for each update. 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.

For example, new developers hopping onto a new project will struggle to comprehend the changes to the entire codebase — even with air-tight documentation. If you want to build an application that doesn’t require scaling, monolithic software architecture can solve your problems. We have a service internally that allows us to spin up a new service on a particular stack and it precedes things like logging, monitoring, and cacheing. Finally, we automated as much as we could, including the migration process itself. We created our own dashboard to view all migrations effectively in real time. The right tools are essential when undergoing a microserivces migration.

Monolithic vs. microservice architectures for innovation

With these thoughts in mind, let’s explore the value of microservices and how they can be used to provide the flexibility that’s lacking in monolithic architectures. Microservices architecture isn’t just limited to coding, it requires well-planned deployment on cloud platform too. 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. In monolith-based solutions, all communications are realized within a single instance of a deployed application. Since there are fewer network communications, it takes minimum time for a data packet to travel from one designated point to another.

Despite the growing popularity and manufacturability of microservices, the monolithic approach is still used due to the presence of several undeniable advantages. A young product and a young team of specialists will make their choice in favor of a monolithic structure and they will be right. Your product isn’t developed yet and you’re at the start-up stage. Developing a monolithic architecture will take less time than creating many microservices. In contrast to a monolithic architecture, microservices’ capabilities are expressed formally with business-oriented APIs.

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Even if a single part of the application is facing a large load/traffic, we need to deploy the instances of the entire application in multiple servers. It is very inefficient and takes up more resources unnecessarily. Hence, horizontal scaling is not feasible in monolithic applications. In order to understand microservices, we need to understand what are monolithic applications and what led us to move from monolithic applications to microservices in recent times.

• One important practice is to make sure to have a separate database to store data whenever possible, rather than having the same database for multiple microservices such as in a monolithic architecture.
• Concept, where data is partitioned and the application redirects requests to corresponding shards based on user input .
• Size – It becomes overlarge in size with time and becomes difficult to manage.
• With a single codebase, monolithic apps can easily handle cross-cutting concerns, such as logging, configuration management and performance monitoring.
• If there are two versions of the application, i.e. web and mobile, then developers from both the teams should be present in this team.

We have happier, autonomous teams and a better DevOps culture. As Atlassian grows, microservices enable us to scale teams and geographic locations more reliably by splitting along lines of service ownership. Before we started Vertigo, Atlassian had five different development centers around the world. These distributed teams were constrained by a centralized monolith and we needed to support them in an autonomous fashion. Microservices are less secure relative to monolithic applications due to the inter-services communication over the network.

Jira Service Management

A trend has emerged, and it’s the opposite of what convention would tell us. Companies are first building out technical capabilities using a “monolith first” strategy for developing codebases. Monolith-first applications are made up of modules forming software applications that are not independent of the core application. This strategy is later followed by transitioning these monolithic structures into more scalable microservice architectures.

In addition, services can be written using different technologies. Scalability.One of the main advantages of microservices over monolithic, making it so popular these days. Due to the dispersed system of individual services, the system as a whole is extremely flexible and capable of expanding through changes in individual services.

You can deploy microservices to run many aspects of your business

The word “monolith” is often attributed to something large and glacial, which isn’t far from the truth of a monolith architecture for software design. A monolithic architecture is a singular, large computing network with one code base that couples all of the business concerns together. To make a change to this sort of application requires updating the entire stack by accessing the code base and building and deploying an updated version of the service-side interface. Let’s take a look at how N-iX helped WBS TRAINING, a top German provider of professional training courses, optimize the performance of their learning software by designing a microservice architecture. The client has reached us with a request to boost their operational efficiency, since their legacy monolith learning management system required constant synchronization. Moreover, running the synchronization cycles was time-consuming and negatively affected the system’s performance.

The tradeoffs of microservices architecture vs monolithic architecture

Each service is self-contained and has a specific responsibility. These services communicate with each other using well-defined APIs. This approach can help you build and deploy applications quickly and respond to changes in customer requirements. The huge companies with millions of users are obvious examples of the best use case for microservices, as they need to ensure the uptime, scalability that the added modularity can provide. In a monolithic architecture, the entire application is built as a single unit. This means that all of the application’s components are tightly integrated and communicate with each other through direct method calls or shared libraries.

Demanding to understand

These days, most tech companies model their software development processes on either the lean, waterfall or agile methodology. Some also have a unique DevOps approach dedicated to only software development. When an application malfunctions, diagnosing the problem and debugging the code could be a massive challenge under certain conditions. For example, if the system is distributed across multiple, complex microservices, testers may not spot an easy fix, and often need to debug every unit separately to pinpoint the origin of the issue. When an application is split into microservices, the separate units carry out unique functions.

These microservices are built independently around the business logic and have a fully independent deployment mechanism. This is the traditional approach to building applications that all of us have come across. Despite the fact that modern trends are forcing digital companies to increasingly make their choice in favor of a microservice architecture, the monolithic approach still has its advantages.

Today at least a quarter of leading IT companies use container solutions in a big production, and this number is likely to grow further. DZone shows that 73% of companies believe that microservices will become advantages of microservices over monolithic indispensable for building next-gen software applications. All the components of a microservice architecture are independent, allowing you to redeploy them in other applications without affecting other units.

Kubernetes enables engineers to automate deployment scheduling, scaling, self-healing, data backups, security protocols, and more microservices management tasks to reduce human error and save time and costs. Containers and microservices are so well-suited to each other that many people use the two terms interchangeably. Yet, containers and microservices are different, and you can use either without the other.

How to migrate from monolithic to microservice?

Each individual can build a module and deploy a module independently, thereby reducing the team’s operational friction and increasing the software delivery’s agility. Numerous tools do facilitate easy development and deployment strategies. Developers need to perform a single chunk of deployable code instead of making updates in separate entities. The image above shows a distributed architecture, which is enabled by the implementation of microservices. The diagram indicates that small microservices can be deployed on a heterogeneous set of hosts. This distributed architecture adds to the high reliability, scalability, and portability of the overall application.