There has been a lot of talk about the microservices recently but at the same time we have forgotten to raise the question: why microservices? what has motivated us, developers, to migrate and start using it in some situations ? Well, today I am going to write about the traditional monolithic architecture in software development.

The concept of Monolithic Architecture nowadays

A monolithic architecture is a self-contained application to which all modules are tightly coded and shared throughout the entire application. It is often used at the beginning of a project development in which teams typically choose to move forward with this traditional architecture in order to make development easier. That is not necessarily bad.

Furthermore, there are other points to take into account such as time, team/company size and business knowledge. In fact, if you know exactly your “business problem” before putting hand at hard work, you might have an idea of what kind of architecture you need. But don’t you think that picking an architecture is just about planning. There are other key points which are decisive to be taken into consideration:

Time

Do you remember the saying “Time is money” ? .. well, kind of, isn’t? I am not saying that we should avoid good architecture, but time is extremely important for any company, and unfortunately the saying already speaks for itself. There will be moments when there won’t be much time left to expend on thinking and planning for too long. Unlike monolithic architecture, microservices require solid knowledge about several important points in advance

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we should always pick the fastest and easiest architecture as we will see ahead. The cheap can turn into expensive! Remember, a building is easy to build but extremely hard to change once its foundations are already set. You don’t wan’t to change a house into a flat, right ? Well, What I’m trying to say is that once we choose an architecture, as codebase grows, it can be potentially cumbersome to change and migrate it later on. That’s what my weird example was supposed to mean somehow.

Company Size

Company size influences on the selection of the architecture style. If the company has few employees, using monolithic architecture is highly recommended in order to prevent team’s overload when it comes to handling so many distributed services. However, it is subsequently recommended to keep the code as well organized as possible because there is always the risk of the code getting too complex and big.

Additionally, when the company grows in size, it might choose to reassess and organize these applications to distributed systems. The effort is worth despite the time required. Consequently the teams can focus on developing.

Business Knowledge

A concept that aids in elaborating the kind of architecture an application needs is previously knowing the domain of the application. Once the developers have done that, It is possible to identify in what parts the microservices can be used or what kind of architecture the project is going to take in general.

Now that we have discussed the major points involving monolith architecture, let’s talk about Its advantages and drawbacks

Advantages of using the monolithic architecture

• The application performance is better because we don’t need to call other services once the business concern is centralized in one unit. In other words, the application throughput is reduced.
• Ease development is another key point for small monolith application. During this process the developer gets in touch with project code directly and can develop a rich understanding of it, once the team doesn’t need to jump to other projects. For this reason, devs don’t need to worry about communication and infrastructure challenges from distributed services once monolithic paradigm is centralized.
• Testing, debuging and keeping track of logs is simple as it is limited to one application. That is a challenging when handling distributed services.

Disadvantages

Despite the ease developing, the monolithic paradigm is recommended at the beginning of a project life cycle and when the project is mean to be or is still smaller than a complex one. Here is the main disadvantages of monolith:

You will realize that most of the drawbacks happen when the code gets too large. DON’T LET THE CODE TURN INTO A MONSTER!

Complexity

A large code base brings complexity which limits the agility and speed of code developing. It is also challenging and time-consuming to migrate to another paradigm.

Deployment

Contrary to small monolithic applications, big applications take more time to deploy on. Depending on kind of application, the deploying can reach up to 1 hour, mainly if you horizontally scales your monolithic application. Furthermore, if any component has an issue, you can waste more time rolling it back or fixing it in a new deploy. Good luck.

Hard to scale

If any component of a monolithic application requires more resources, the entire application needs scaling. As a result, this leads to more money and resources expending.

Lack of Improvements

Once the application uses a technology, all of its components are limited to it. So, let’s image if your application uses Java 8 and you need to use a Java 17 feature; The entire application will have to be updated and run accordingly to the newer version. But the problem doesn’t stop here. When you have a lot of dependencies, updates to support the additional version are required as well.

That’s why It is a challenge because It is mostly certain that some part of the code will break in such a way that fixing it will demand so much time on it.

Conclusion

The monolithic architecture offers advantages such as simplicity, rapid development, and good performance. However, its disadvantages, such as limited scalability, tight coupling and dependencies, and difficulty in adopting modern technologies, can hinder its maintenance and evolution over time. As demands and system requirements evolve, other architectures like microservices-based architecture have gained popularity as more flexible and scalable alternatives.