In the emerging microservices trend, the conversation about Microservices vs Monolith pros and cons is inevitable. The microservice architecture provides tangible benefits like scalability and flexibility and is a cost-effective way to create heavy applications.
Tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Oracle generally implement microservices in one application or the other. On the contrary, the monolithic approach is losing value as it poses risks to current software delivery methodologies. Before we go into the final comparison of Microservices vs Monoliths, let’s look at both architectures individually.
Table of contents
- What are Microservices?
- What is Monolithic?
- Microservices vs Monolith: Architecture
- Microservices vs Monoliths: Pros and Cons
- Microservices: Use Cases
- Microservices vs Monoliths: Deployment Strategies
- Microservices vs Monoliths: Operational Impacts
- How to migrate from Monoliths to Microservices?
- Microservices vs Monoliths: Which should you choose?
- Closing Thoughts
- Microservices vs Monoliths: FAQs
What are Microservices?
Microservices are small deployable services that are modeled around complex applications. A microservice is often defined as a newer version of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). They communicate with each other using different techniques, and they also have the advantage of being technology agnostic.
From a technical viewpoint, microservices expose one business/technical capability of the applications they encapsulate via multiple small services. Different microservices communicate via API endpoints/HTTP protocols, making it into a distributed system.
Read the blog on Microservices Best Practices.
The image above shows the implementation of microservices that enable a distributed architecture. The diagram indicates that small microservices can be deployed on a heterogeneous set of hosts, ranging from Bare Metal instances to public clouds. This distributed architecture adds to the overall application’s high reliability, scalability, and portability.
Read our blog about Multi tenant architecture SaaS application on AWS to create your microservice SaaS application!
What is Monolithic?
The term monolith comes from an ancient representation of a huge rock. When we talk about software, monoliths are nothing but a large block of codes having multiple modules. These modules are tightly coupled with each other. The application and the business logic are encapsulated in a single deployable binary called a monolith. Usually, a monolith consists of a conventional three-tier architecture, namely, a database, a user interface, and a server-side application. The diagram below represents the idea of the monolith in a nutshell.
What is the difference between microservices architecture and monolithic architecture?
Monoliths are a single build of a unified code. This usually consists of three parts, the UI, the database, and the server-side application. The server-side application usually handles all the HTTP requests and executes the business logic. In monoliths, the server-side logic, the UI logic, the batch jobs, etc., are all bundled in a single EAR (Enterprise Archive), WAR (Web Archive), or a JAR (Java Archive) file. Fig 2.1 shows us a high-level representation of the Monolith Architecture.
Contrary to the above, the word “micro” means small, and Microservices denote a collection of small services to accomplish a business logic. This architectural style aimes to create small suites of services that add up to build a larger application. All the microservices run their processes to make this work and have lightweight communication mechanisms, i.e., HTTP resource APIs. These microservices are built independently around the business logic and have a fully independent deployment mechanism.
Microservices vs Monolith Pros and Cons
Both Microservices and Monoliths have a distinct set of benefits that can impact while deciding the optimal architecture for your application. Let’s talk about the Microservices vs Monoliths pros and cons.
Monolithic architecture pros
Easy development and deployment
Monolithic applications have existed since forever. 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.
Performance
Better performance is a crucial advantage of monolithic applications over microservices. A microservice-based application may have to make 100 different API calls to 100 other microservices to load one UI screen. Whereas in the monolithic, one API call can serve the same purpose because it has a centralized code and memory.
Monolithic architecture cons
Tight Coupling
Service modules in monolithic applications are tightly coupled. Business logic is tightly entangled and makes it difficult to isolate the application, and hence scalability becomes a challenge.
Slow Build and Release cycle
Since the code base is enormous, this retards the velocity of the development and testing cycle of the application.
Microservice architecture pros
Better Organization
In the Microservice vs Monoliths pros and cons debate, the entire code base breaks down into smaller services for better organization. The microservices have a particular job and are not dependent on other components.
Increased Agility
With microservices, individuals of a team can work on individual modules. 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.
The figure above illustrates that every developer on the team will have the liberty to work on independent modules. Code repositories, builds, and deployments are separate from one another. The elements being loosely coupled increases the agility of the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Microservice architecture cons
Increased Network Traffic
With multiple services communicating over the network, microservices can lead to slightly increased network traffic. This is generally manageable with proper infrastructure.
Potential for Duplication
Microservices can sometimes lead to duplication of efforts, as different teams may build similar functionality in isolation. However, this can be minimized with good communication and coordination.
Read the complete blog on the benefits of Microservices.
Microservices Use cases
Multiple tech giants adopt Microservices. The implementation of microservices varies from case to case. But some of the significant applications that we use on a day-to-day basis use Microservices, like:
Uber Case Study
Like many startups, Uber also started with a monolithic architecture built to run the cab aggregator service in a single city. With time, Uber’s rigorous global expansion opened up many challenges concerning its scalability and continuous integration pipeline.
The diagram above depicts the old architecture Uber used to follow. There was a REST API that connected the drivers to the passengers. They used three different adapters within the APIs for billing, payments, emails, and messages. And used a MySQL database to store all the data. So, all the functionalities of the application were encapsulated in a single framework. This monolithic framework possessed prominent challenges when it came to upscaling the application.
How did Uber changed its architecture?
Now, let’s look at the below diagram and understand what changes Uber brought to level up its technical growth strategy.
✔ An API Gateway was introduced to connect all the drivers to the passengers. The API Gateway internally connects all the microservices such as Passenger Management, Driver Management, Trip management, etc., through REST API calls.
✔ Each microservice performs a singular functionality and has separate deployable binaries. For example, if you change anything in the Driver Management microservice, you just need to build and deploy the Driver Management microservice and not touch the others.
✔ Since all microservices are loosely coupled, their interdependency is greatly reduced. Hence, all the individual microservices can be scaled up to any level. For example, the number of people looking for a cab is anytime higher than the number of people booking a cab or making its payment. In such a case, the processes and the services involved in the trip booking and trip payments can be up-scaled.
In this way, the world’s largest cab aggregator company, Uber, has benefitted by migrating its architecture from monolith to microservice. Dive into Uber’s system design by reading the full blog.
Microservices vs Monolith Deployment Strategies
While monoliths follow the traditional deployments, microservices have given the system architects a tough time designing the deployment strategy. Since monoliths have a three-tier architecture, they have always been deployed on web servers like Apache Tomcat, Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, etc.
Let’s focus on the microservices deployment strategy. Microservices are known for high scalability; therefore, the supporting IT infrastructure should also be scalable. Here are some of the deployment strategies to choose from for your requirements:
One service-One host
This is a traditional approach for deploying applications. Multiple services can be deployed on one virtual machine. One virtual machine is provisioned and used for the deployment of various services. This ultimately decreases the cost of infrastructure as all the services are running on one host.
One Service-One Container
In this model, applications running on the ecosystem that supports Docker and Kubernetes play a crucial role. The services are packaged as images and are deployed in containers on the virtual hosts. Containers are incredibly lightweight and easy to build. Containerization enables complete isolation of services. Containerization of microservices also optimizes the infrastructure cost as multiple services are being hosted on a single virtual machine.
Serverless Deployment
Applications developed in programming languages like Node.js, Python, and Java can support stateless and serverless deployments. A Lambda function is created, which runs the microservices and handles all the requests. Again, this strategy is one of the most cost-effective strategies as organizations are billed only for the number of requests in the cloud environment.
More on Serverless vs Containers: Read the full blog.
Microservices vs Monolith Operational Impacts
When considering any infrastructure, the first question that comes to our mind is, “What will be the new technology’s operational impacts?” In case you have decided to adopt the microservices, there are undoubtedly some significant impacts that you should consider.
Microservices vs Monolith: Cost
Several aspects come under the umbrella of “cost.” Cost of getting started, maintenance cost, cost of development, cost of quality, cost of speed and performance, and the cost of ownership. Cost is a significant factor that comes to the executives’ mind while taking the final decision of adopting any software architecture.
Microservices vs Monolith: Reliability
When it comes to reliability, Microservices has the upper hand here as well. Monoliths are nothing but a big chunk of application binaries. By any chance, if the deployment fails, the entire application goes down. Compared to monoliths, microservices are very reliable. Even in cases when a service fails, the application will not go down as a whole. There are multiple service detection tools like Hashicorp Consul, which checks on every service’s heartbeat. On a high-level, reliability is higher in applications running on microservices.
Microservices vs Monolith: Scalability
Monoliths can be scaled in multiple ways. One of them is to use numerous VMs and then route the request using a load balancer. Microservice architecture is more fine-grained, and hence scaling each microservice is more fine-grained and flexible. Scalability is a contrasting factor of any enterprise application. So, there are multiple techniques available in the market, ensuring that microservices are scalable, both horizontally and vertically. Some of the popular tools available in the market are Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, Docker, and Kubernetes. For precise scaling and better usage of resources, microservices is a clear winner.
If you want to learn more about the tools mentioned before, I recommend you this blog about Amazon ECS vs EKS that describes each of them and helps you understand when to choose one or another.
Microservices vs Monolith: Time to Market
Due to its bulky size and higher dependencies, build and deploy mechanisms in monoliths are more complicated and time-consuming. Microservices are less resource-sensitive and are built to scale. Since the modules are decoupled from each other, it is easier to build and deploy. This increases the agility of the application running on microservices and significantly reduces the time for microservice applications to reach the market.
Accelerate time-to-market with application modernization strategies: read the full blog.
How to migrate from Monoliths to Microservices?
Before you migrate from monolith to microservices, there are specific application-level changes that you should adopt. We will discuss several ways on a high-level to embrace microservices.
Build Optimization
Monoliths have existed for ages. Monolithic Java projects are built using ANT and Maven. The first step is to streamline your build. You should also remove the dependencies and other external factors affecting your build.
Decouple the Dependencies
Once the build process is streamlined, you should remove the monoliths’ modular dependencies. You may have to refactor your code to achieve this level of decoupling.
Optimize Local Dev
Build, deploy, and the test should happen at a faster velocity on the local development environment. Tools like Docker should also be embraced at the local level. This helps in speeding up the operational tasks like setting up a local database, etc.
Parallel Development
Multiple branches should be created in the code repository dedicated to all the different microservices. This setup will promote parallel development of all the monoliths and increase the agility of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Adopting IaC will enable more uniform and consistent infrastructure. Using a pragmatic approach to build environments will significantly help developers bring the cloud environment closer to their laptops. Read this article about Infrastructure as code and how to adopt it!
Microservices vs Monolith: Which should you choose?
Making the right decision of which architecture to choose depends on several factors. Both monoliths and microservices have their pros and cons. However, there are specific considerations you should look into before making the final decision.
Technical Competency
The first thing you should consider is how well you are acquainted with both architectures. If you decide to move towards microservices, are you well versed with all the practices involved in building products on this architecture?
Team
Is your team prepared to imbibe and ingest the principles of microservices? Evaluating the dimensions of the growth of your team and your product is crucial while adopting microservices.
Infrastructure
Infrastructures running on Docker and Kubernetes are best suited to run microservices. In reality, you should have an excellent cloud-based infrastructure if you decide to go with microservices.
Evaluate Business Risks
Microservices may look right in all aspects, but they pose risks to the business. Areas need to be identified which need scaling. Many efforts and human hours can go to waste if you scale those parts that are not required now. The critical business risk is the misplaced effort that can arise due to vertical/horizontal scaling of microservices.
What is the best SaaS tech stack for your app? We tell you on this blog!
Microservices vs Monolith Closing Thoughts
Adopting microservices is a difficult approach. Not all architecture is the same. Similarly, not all applications are the same. Incremental adoption of microservices, associated technologies, and practices is the key. Microservices are more beneficial for complex and evolving applications. However, without proper expertise in these technologies, adopting microservices will be a colossal task.
This blog gives you an overview of what Microservices vs Monoliths pros and cons look like. Ultimately, you’ll need to find the best approach that works well in your context. But don’t worry, that’s why we’re here! Feel free to contact us anytime you need it!
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Microservices vs Monolith: FAQs
Monoliths are single, unified applications where all components are interconnected and managed together. This structure makes them simpler to develop initially but harder to scale and maintain as the application grows. In contrast, microservices architecture breaks down the application into independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately, offering greater flexibility, resilience, and ease of maintenance.
Starting with a monolith can be simpler and more cost-effective for small projects due to its straightforward development and deployment. However, as your project grows, transitioning to a microservices architecture can provide better scalability, flexibility, and maintainability. It’s essential to consider the complexity and long-term needs of your project when making this decision.
This depends on your Continuous Delivery Pipeline. If you can build, deploy and test your application using a single repository, you may consider this option. But the best practice is to have individual repositories for individual services.
No. Microservices can be built around any tech stack you are already using.
Docker itself is neither monolithic nor microservices. It is a containerization tool that allows you to package applications and their dependencies into containers. These containers can run both monolithic applications and microservices, providing a consistent environment for development, testing, and deployment across various architectures.
