Benefits and Challenges of Monolithic Architecture

Published in

Design Microservices Architecture with Patterns & Principles

6 min readFeb 14, 2023

In this article, we are going to learn Benefits and Challenges of Monolithic Architecture.

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

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

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.

Monolithic architecture is considered to be a traditional way of building applications. A monolithic application is built as a single big code base that means it has one large code base. If developers want to update or change something, they access the same code base. So, they make changes in the whole stack at once.

So what is the Strengths — Benefits — Advantages of the Monolithic Architecture ?

Benefits of Monolithic Architecture

Here you can find list of benefits about using Monolithic Architectures:

Simple to develop

As long as the monolithic approach is a standard way of building applications, any engineering team has the right knowledge and capabilities to develop a monolithic application. That means it is relatively easier and simple to develop in comparison to microservices architecture.

Easier debugging and testing

Monolithic applications are much easier to debug and test when we compare with the Microservices Architecture. Since a monolithic application has a single code base, we can run end-to-end testing much faster.

Simple to deploy

Another advantage associated with the simplicity of monolithic apps is easier deployment. When it comes to monolithic applications, you do not have to handle many deployments — just one file or directory. Easier to deploy as only a single jar/war file is deployed. The problems of network latency and security are relatively less in comparison to microservices architecture.

So if you are building small application, still monolithic architecture is one of the best architecture that you can apply for your projects.

Challenges of Monolithic Architecture

Now, we are going to learn Weaknesses — Challenges — Dis-advantages of Monolithic Architecture. In many ways, monolithic apps are straightforward. However, monolithic architectures can occurs many challenges. Over time of developing monolithic apps, you may reach a point that you begin to lose control. Here you can find list of challenges about using Monolithic Architectures:

Become Complex over time — Hard to Understand

It becomes too large in size with time and that’s why its difficult to manage. Application grows with adding new functionalities, a monolithic codebase can become extremely large and complex. This can be difficult to manage, it becomes too complicated to understand, especially as the team of developers working on the individual codebase expands. So that means, at some point, the monolith application has become so complicated that no single person understands it.

Hard to Making New changes and Slower development speed

It is harder to implement new changes in such a large and complex application with highly tight coupling. Any code change affects the whole system. A large, monolithic application makes development more complex and slower. This makes You fear when making new changes. And these changes brings costly side effects. And also this makes the overall development process much longer. It will develop new features become time-consuming and expensive to implement. Even the smallest change requires full deployment of the entire application — it is expensive and risky. It is not reliable because a single bug can bring down the whole monolithic application.

Barrier to new technology adoption

It is extremely problematic to apply a new technology in a monolithic application because the entire application has to be re development due to the interlocking dependencies found in a monolith. Any changes in the framework or language affects the entire application, making changes often expensive and time-consuming.

We can say this condition as the Fear Cycle. If you’ve developing same monolithic application for a long time, It’s stressful to change your full code base with newest technology. Instead of building new or innovative solutions, most of your time is spent maintaining legacy apps. So we can say that Adding new technologies and frameworks aren’t an option.

Difficult to Scale

You can’t scale components independently, the only option is the scaling the whole application. You can’t scale individual components. Maybe one of your module get more request according to other modules but you have to scale for all modules in your application. You can’t separate modules and scale independently.

Deployments and Reliability

If there’s an error in any module, it could affect the entire application’s availability. A small change to a monolithic application requires the redeployment of the entire monolith.

Monolithic or Microservices Architecture ?

The choice between monolithic and microservices architecture is a common question in software architecture because it is a fundamental decision that affects the design, development, and maintenance of a software system.

For that reason its good to hear from experts on Software Industry.

From Chris Richardson

Let me continue with tweet from Chris Richardson:

As you can see that he is pointing out that there is no perfect architecture and all architecture styles are a architecture pattern and non of them better than other.

From DHH

Lets continue to another tweet from DHH.

The Majestic Monolith — Signal v. Noise (signalvnoise.com)

Here you can see that DHH and Kelsey agree with Monolithic architecture is still very valid architecture in 2020s. So that means we should consider Monolithic architecture as the same level with Microservices architecture when we design our applications.

The main idea is here, we must pick the architecture that satisfies your application’s non-functional requirements, like scalability, availability and so on. Yes everyone wants to design high scalable and high available systems but as an software architect you should focus on problem and ask yourself

Is it required for your application ?

To avoid unnecessary cost and resource usage and to avoid over-engineering of that problem. Because when you apply advanced architecture for your small problem, you did anti-pattern implementation and loose benefits of your application nature like easy to develop , debug and deploy options and so on.

Design Monolithic Architecture — E-Commerce App

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

There is a big single Monolithic Application Server and one big relational databases.

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