In this article, we will see the Monolithic and Microservices architecture differences.
Monolith
Monolith is an application deployed as a single unit in single or multiple servers behind a Load Balancer. You have a User Interface, Business Logic, and Data Access Layer interacting with a database.
Advantages
- Easy to debug and deploy since there is only one application.
- Easy to develop and maintain as we have a single application where UI calls the web service or API without worrying about API backward compatibility and version management. Also, there is only a single point of failure.
- Only one repository or codebase is easy to maintain and test than integrating multiple services for testing.
- Less latency as communication between layers in the application is local.
Disadvantages
- Tightly coupled code as an issue in one piece of code might affect other parts of code.
- Hard to maintain as the application grows in size.
- Scalability is a concern as the application as a whole is scaled irrespective of usage. For instance, if we have a Monolith application created with Login, Storage, Retrieval, and Polling functionalities in place. During peak time, if the Retrieval part of the application experiences high traffic, the entire application is scaled up even though other independent parts do not need scaling.
- Irreversible choice of coding language as a rewrite is required to choose a different language.
Microservices
Microservices is an architecture pattern where an application consists of several small deployable services, which communicate to share data.
Advantages
- Decoupled code and lightweight.
- Easy to maintain when the application has a lot of reusable code.
- Better scalability as there is an option to scale components individually.
- Choice of using multiple programming languages for different services based on the requirement.
- Better Fault tolerance as an issue in a microservice will only affect that part of the application.
Disadvantages
- Deployment is bit tedious as it involves maintenance across different services.
- Difficulties in maintaining the code dependencies and testing multiple codebases.
- Latency often arises due to the communication calls made between services across the network.
What to opt for?
Monolith
- When the application is simple with less release time to market.
- Limited scaling with moderate application size.
Microservices
- For largescale applications which involve CPU-intensive business logic or complex real-time data processing.
- When the application has independent, reusable modules.
References
For more details related to Monolithic vs Microservices, please refer links below
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/microservice_architecture/microservice_architecture_introduction.htm