3 Reasons to Build Monolithic Systems

And yes, I mean on purpose.

Recommending a monolithic architecture these days sounds a bit like prescribing bloodletting for a fever, but hear me out. Long term, to ensure scalability, serviceability, agility, and all the other positive -ities (including sanity) you’ll likely want to develop and deploy your application on a microservices architecture. But if you are building a new application, your company and your development team may not yet be ready for the ironic complexity involved in breaking a system down into simple services. Speed and time to market may trump elegance…and that’s ok!

The first reason to build a monolithic system is to help tame the unknowns. Pick up any book or article on getting started with microservices, and it will describe a process for breaking down a system into component services. But if you are just starting out, you don’t yet have a system to break down. It can be quite difficult to just figure out what requirements you need in the system at all, much less to try and decompose these requirements into a set of loosely-coupled services with well-defined interfaces. With the level of unknowns at a typical start, the likelihood of getting…