Monolithic Vs Microservice Architecture

Monolithic Architecture

Defintion

• Single Codebase
• Tighly Coupled and Shared Memory
• Centralized Database

• Components

  • User Interface (UI)
  • Application Layer (Business Logic)
  • Data Access Layer (ORM)
  • Database (PostgresSQL, MySQL)
  • External Dependency (API Integration)
  • Middleware

• Good for small teams and startups.

• Easy to setup and economical in comparision to distributed system
• Easy to perform End-to-end testing and catch issues and bugs.

Disadvantages

• A minor change in code requires re-deployment of entire system.
• Limited Scalability - Need to scale even the idle and less used components.
• High resource consumption
• Single Point of Failure

Scaling Strategy

• Verticle Scaling but has practicle limitations.
• Performance Optimizations
• Caching
• Load Balancing
• Database Sharding

Microservice Architecture

• Independent deployable service and each service has its own business logics
• Decouples business logics
• Allow best tool for each business problem

Advantages

• It promotes agility in team work.
• Flexible Scaling for individual services
• Continuos Deployment Cycle
• Highly Maintanable and testable
• High Reliability
• Technology Flexibility

Disadvantages

• Increased Complexity
• Exponential Infastructure Cost
• Added Organization Overhead
• Debugging Challenges due to distributed logs
• Lack of clear ownership
• Increased latency due to inter-communication between system (think about every network call, serialization, deserialization of data)