AWS Serverless back to Monolith!

Karjalpp
DataDreamers
Published in
5 min readJun 1, 2023

Objective: Transitioning from a serverless architecture to a Monolithic architecture on AWS is to simplify the development process and reduce the time and cost of maintenance. With a monolithic architecture, all components of an application are located in a single codebase, making it easier to manage and maintain. Additionally, it can reduce the complexity of the application and reduce the number of moving parts, making it more cost-effective and efficient.

Once upon a time, there was a business that relied on a monolith system to run its operations. The system was complex and expensive to maintain, and updates were hard to come by. The business was in need of a solution that would allow them to scale and keep up with the ever-changing technology landscape.

Enter AWS serverless architecture. With serverless, the business was able to quickly spin up resources on demand and focus on building features and services rather than managing servers. The business could also reduce costs since they were only paying for the resources as they were needed instead of having to pay for a perpetually running infrastructure.

Fig:1 AWS serverless Architecture
Fig:1 AWS Lambda serverless Architecture

The business soon realized the benefits of serverless and decided to transition their existing monolith application to a serverless architecture. The transition was relatively smooth since the existing code was largely compatible with the serverless framework.

The business was now able to take advantage of features such as auto-scaling, event-driven execution, and pay-per-use billing. This allowed them to focus on developing features and services that improved the customer experience. They could also utilize the serverless framework to deploy code faster and with fewer errors.

The business was able to reduce their costs and improve their application performance with the transition from monolith to serverless architecture. They now have the agility and scalability to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape.

In theory, the use of serverless would allow the team to scale each service independently. It turned out, however, that at least for how the team implemented the components, they hit a hard scaling limit at only 5% of the expected load. The costs of scaling up to monitor thousands of video streams would also be unduly expensive, due to the need to send data across multiple components.

Initially, the team tried to optimize individual components, but this did not bring about significant improvements. So, the team moved all the components into a single process, hosting them on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).

fig:3 Amazon (EC2) & Amazon (ECS)
fig:4 AWS monolithic architecture

The need for a monolithic AWS architecture compared to a serverless architecture depends on the needs of your project.

Monolithic architectures are more suitable for applications that require complex processes and need to scale up quickly. They are also better for applications that have heavy traffic.

On the other hand, serverless architectures are better for applications that require more flexibility and are better for applications that don’t need to scale rapidly. Serverless architectures also usually cost less.

Benefits Of AWS serverless to Monolith:

  1. AWS serverless architecture include scalability, cost efficiency, and automated management.
  2. With serverless architecture, you don’t have to worry about managing and maintaining servers, which can lead to cost savings.
  3. Additionally, it is easy to scale up resources when needed. The cons of serverless architecture include lack of control, complexity, and potential vendor lock-in.
  4. You may have limited control over the underlying infrastructure and services, and the overall setup can be complex.
  5. Lastly, depending on the service, you may be locked into a particular vendor.

Cons of AWS serverless to Monolith Architecture:

  1. main downside to a serverless architecture over a monolith architecture is that it can be difficult to debug and troubleshoot issues.
  2. Serverless architectures lack the ability to inspect server processes or logs, making it difficult to determine exactly what is causing an issue.
  3. Additionally, serverless architectures can be more expensive to maintain due to the additional cost of cloud services.
  4. Finally, serverless architectures require a greater level of expertise to fully utilize, making it more difficult for less experienced developers to understand and use.

Challenges:
1. Increased cost: While transitioning from serverless to monolith, the cost of maintaining the servers and the software will increase due to the need to run the application on a larger and more powerful server.
2. Complexity of managing the infrastructure: Moving from serverless to monolith will require a more complex setup of servers, databases, and software, all of which need to be managed in order to keep the application running.
3. Difficulty of debugging: Debugging an application running in a monolith architecture can be more difficult than debugging a serverless application, as it will require a deeper understanding of the underlying infrastructure and how it affects the application.
4. Security risks: As the application will be running on a single server, any security breaches are more likely to have a greater impact on the application.
5. Management overhead: With a monolith architecture, there will be more effort needed to manage the application and ensure it is running optimally.

Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

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