Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture: Which One to Pick?

The advancement in technology has drastically changed the way software engineers develop the architecture of an application. An array of the latest technological developments, such as Container Orchestration, Docker, and Cloud services have escalated the ability of developers to come up with reliable, more scalable and distributed solutions. In this digital era, there is always a debate when it comes to picking between microservices vs monolithic architecture.

In this post from Quarks, we will try to put draw some light on the differences between Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture and which one to pick.

Before we reach a final conclusion, let’s discuss the benefits and limitations of Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture.

Benefits of Monolithic Architecture

Simple development process.

Deployment of monolithic application is effortless. All that you will have to do is just to make a copy of the packaged application and paste it on the server.

Testing of application developed on monolithic architecture is simple. You can also use a framework like Selenium to do automatic testing.

As shared-memory access is works faster than inter-process communication (IPC), it works it gives an upper edge to monolithic in debate of microservices vs monolithic architecture.

Related Post: Why Everyone Should Switch to Microservices?

Limitation of Monolithic Architecture

Monolithic architectures do not provide much flexibility. You cannot incorporate other technologies while you are using Monolithic.

While picking one between microservices vs monolithic architecture, you will find that it takes a lot of time to develop applications in a monolithic architecture. It is difficult for developers to understand and make changes in the coding of heavy monolithic applications.

Scalability is one of the biggest issues in monolithic architecture once it gets larger. They are not able to scale up the applications as the load keeps on increasing.

Continuous deployment is a strenuous task in monolithic architecture. In fact, large applications are nothing less than an obstacle

It is because of these drawbacks in monolithic applications that microservices architecture has successfully managed to gain popularity in masses day by day.

How Microservice Architecture Handles the Drawbacks in Monolithic Applications

Development Speed 

When it comes to the debate between microservices vs monolithic architecture, you cannot compete with the development speed you get while using microservice architecture. As the volume is much lesser here, new team members take no time to understand and make changes in the code. Code quality is well maintained and IDE is faster making the development process faster.

Flexibility

Microservices architecture is flexible than monolithic that gives it an upper hand in between microservices vs monolithic architecture. As you can write each microservice using a different set of technology. This means that you can pick up the aptest tech stack to cater to a particular need for your service. With microservices by your side, you can easily scale your services and add new components in the system effortlessly. 

Easy to Build and Maintain

One of the best features of microservice architecture is its simplicity. It becomes easy to develop and maintain apps when they are divided into composable and smaller pieces. Managing the codes becomes a painless task as code for each microservice is written separately. You can implement the services choosing different databases, programming languages and software environments. It enables every service to deploy, rebuild, re-deploy and manage separately.