Architecture Comparison: Monolithic vs Microservices

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Design Microservices Architecture with Patterns & Principles

6 min readFeb 17, 2023

In this article, we are going to compare Monolithic vs Microservices Architecture. By this way, you will good understand which design better fits your business requirements and capacity.

Architecture Comparison: Monolithic vs Microservices

By this article, we are going to understand the best use cases of Monolithic and Microservices Architecture and Design our E-Commerce application with both Monolithic and Microservices Architecture.

I have just published a new course — Design Microservices Architecture with Patterns & Principles.

What is Monolithic Architecture ?

A monolithic architecture is a traditional approach to software development. Monolithic architecture is an architectural pattern of designing and developing a complete application as a single unit. For example, a traditional application will have a frontend, API, services, load balancer, and database. If you build everything together and deploy it on the server, that’s called a monolithic architecture, where services tightly couple together.

What is Microservices Architecture ?

Microservices are an architectural approach to building and deploying software applications that involves breaking down an application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and maintained separately. While there are many benefits to using microservices, there are also some challenges that need to be considered.

Architecture Comparison with Different Perspectives

Here you can find the Architecture Comparison with Different Perspectives:

Application Architecture Comparison

Monolith has a simple straightforward structure of one undivided unit. Microservices have a complex structure that consists of various heterogeneous services and databases. You can find the Application Architecture Comparison at image below:

Scalability Comparison

Monolithic application is scaled as a whole single unit, but microservices can be scaled unevenly, and this will save business and development teams a lot of time and resources. This difference between monolithic and microservices encourages companies to migrate their rapidly-growing applications to microservices to drive agility and enable a more cost-effective approach to development.

Deployment Comparison

Monolithic application provides fast and easy deployment of the whole system. On the other hand, In microservices, You can deploy different components in a microservices application independently. This enables frequent and zero-downtime deployment and CI/CD automation. You can find the Deployment Comparison at image below:

Development Team Comparison

If your team doesn’t have experience with microservices and container systems, building a microservices-based application will be difficult. Monoliths architecture can be preferable for single developers or small teams.
On the other hand, if you have a team skilled in microservices deployments and plan to expand your team over time, starting with microservices can save time in the future. Microservices provide better flexibility when it comes to team composition, distribution of tasks and ownership.

Resilience Comparison

Microservices applications are more resilient thanks to independent deployment and loose coupling if we compared to tight coupling in monolith applications.

Troubleshooting Comparison

Large monolith is harder to troubleshoot due to various dependencies and tight coupling between system components. But, Microservices enable fast and easy problem tracing and troubleshooting.

So if we listed the characteristics for comparison of Monolithic vs Microservices Architecture, you can find below:

Monolithic Architecture:

In a monolithic architecture, the entire application is built as a single, cohesive unit.
The codebase is usually tightly coupled and interdependent, making it difficult to modify or scale individual components.
The entire application is deployed as a single unit, which can make it difficult to roll out updates or new features without affecting the entire system.
Testing, debugging, and maintenance of the system can be more challenging, as changes made to one part of the system can potentially impact other parts of the application.
Monolithic architectures are generally more straightforward to develop and deploy, as they require less infrastructure and architectural complexity than microservices architectures.

Microservices Architecture:

In a microservices architecture, the application is broken down into small, independent services that communicate with each other over an API.
Each service can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of the others, allowing for greater agility and flexibility in the development process.
Each service can use its own technology stack, programming language, and database, which can be more efficient and cost-effective for specific components.
Because each service is separate, it can be easier to test, debug, and maintain, as changes to one service are less likely to impact other services in the system.
However, microservices architectures can be more complex to develop and deploy, requiring additional infrastructure and DevOps processes to manage the communication between services.

Team and Deployment Process Comparison

Here you can find the development team and deployment process comparison at image below:

In summary, Monolithic architecture offers simplicity in development and deployment, but can be challenging to modify and scale individual components, while Microservices architecture offers greater agility and flexibility, but can be more complex to develop and deploy. Ultimately, the choice between monolithic and microservices architecture depends on the specific requirements of the application and the organization building it.

From Kelsey Hightower

Lets continue to a tweet thread from Kelsey Hightower.

https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1621184564956893189

https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1621184564956893189

Here you can see that Kelsey go one more step and offers that if we follow Modular Monolithic Architecture and build on Serverless and fully managed components, this would be prefect architecture most of software projects.

I also strongly agree with Kelsey for most of cases, but of course in some cases Microservices are un-avoidable chooses for large-scaled applications. The idea from Kelsey is that if you start with that setup, it can evolve and scale very easily for future requirements.

It is important to note that a Modular monolithic architecture is not a replacement for microservices architecture. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and the choice of architecture depends on the specific requirements of the system being built. A modular monolithic architecture can be a good starting point for a system that may eventually need to evolve into a microservices architecture as the system grows and complexity increases.

Design Modular Monolithic Architecture — E-Commerce App

If we design e-commerce application with Modular Monolithic architecture, you can see the image below:

According to architecture, we can encapsulate new feature developments into a module. And every module can implement its own architecture like Layered, Onion, Clean and so on.

Design Microservice Architecture — E-Commerce App

If we design e-commerce application with Microservice architecture, you can see the image below:

Product microservice can use NoSQL document database Shopping Cart microservice can use NoSQL key-value pair database and Order microservice can use Relational database as per microservice data storage requirements.

What’s Next ?

Step by Step Design Architectures w/ Course