AN OVERVIEW OF THE MONOLITHIC AND MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURE
The art and technique of designing, building, or organizing a system are known as software architecture. This includes all components or elements, how they communicate with one another, the environment in which they operate, and the tools used to design the software. There are various types of software architecture, but this article will focus on monolithic and microservice architecture as well as areas where one outperforms the other.
Monolithic Architecture
A monolithic application is a single-tiered software application with three components: a client-side user interface, a server-side application, and a data interface. All three components connect with a single database, making it simple to manage. It is easier to address issues that affect the entire application and do an end-to-end test.
Microservice Architecture
Microservices architecture is a subset of service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is a software design. It is divided into smaller autonomous components and application components that deliver services to other components. The whole functionality of a microservices architecture is divided into independently deployable modules that communicate with one another via defined ways known as APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
Martin Fowler, an author, lecturer, and overall software development loud-mouth, and James Lewis, a Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks and member of the Technology Advisory Board, defined microservices as follows.
In short, a microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and are independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.. (Click Here to read the full article).
Monolithic vs Microservice
Both monolithic and microservice software architectural styles have benefits and drawbacks. Here are some aspects where either monolithic or microservice outperforms the other:
Scalability
The ability of each microservice to function autonomously makes it extremely simple to add, remove, update, and grow individual microservices. This can be done without interfering with the application’s other microservices, whereas monolithic functions are a single unit that cannot be updated individually but only as a whole. This makes it difficult to extend or expand a specific service in the monolithic. As a result, microservices have an advantage over monolithic in terms of ease of scaling.
Flexibility
The microservices model enables developers to choose the best tools or language for the task or project. They can write each service in any language or framework that they want, without interfering with the communication between microservices. Each service can be built with the appropriate tool and communicate with another service via API. This is not possible in monolithic styles because the entire application is a single unit, making this architecture style inflexible.
Reliability
Microservices operate independently of one another, so the failure of one service is less likely to have a negative impact on other parts of the program, whereas the tightly coupled functionality of Monolithic can result in breakage or downtime for the entire service when a specific service fails. This increases the reliability of microservices.
Increased Complexity
Microservices are made up of several services, and it may be difficult to manage multiple databases, transactions, and debugging, whereas monolithic is simple to manage because it is made up of a single database, and thus easy to debug.
In conclusion, microservices outperform monolithic architectures in terms of scalability; however, this is not to say that monolithic design is inferior; it may be appropriate for a company with a smaller team and less complex technology, but microservices are one of the best approaches for larger organizations. Netflix, Uber, and Amazon are examples of companies that have made the switch to microservices. Click Here to learn more about how and why they switched to Microservices.
