Source: enterprisetimes.co.uk
A monolithic architecture is one built from a single piece of material; therefore, a monolithic application has a single code base with multiple modules that are divided into business features and technical features.
Microservices is an architecture used to separate a monolithic application into several independent services. A microservice application consists of a collection of services. Each service can have multiple runtime instances and be deployed independently.
Both monolithic and microservice architectures have several advantages and disadvantages when compared to each other, particularly when it comes to operational overhead requirements. Let us look at the comparison between monolithic vs microservices.
Advantages of monolithic architecture.
One codebase: Monolithic architecture is built as one large system and is usually one code base services with their codebase within an application.
- Application integration: The idea of application integration in monolithic architecture has made it easier to use the system. Monolithic architecture integrates well with services such as messaging and Rest API.
- Accessibility: Monolithic apps can easily handle a range system that makes one to access it easily such as monitoring performance, logging, and configuration management.
- Technology: A monolithic application must use the same technology stack throughout.
- Memory: Components in a monolith typically comes with a performance advantage, the reason behind it is that its shared memory access is faster than even ICP.
Disadvantages of monolithic architecture.
- An error in any of the modules in a monolithic kernel can bring the entire application down.
- Changes to the technology stack are sometimes expensive although this will vary with many reasons, both in terms of the time and cost is involved.
- Issues with security may occur because there is no isolation among various servers present in the program.
- The large codebase of a monolithic application can be hard to understand.
What are microservices?
- Microservices are a way of breaking large software projects into loosely coupled modules. They communicate with one another through application programming interfaces.
- Advantages of microservices architecture.
- Microservices can be more beneficial for complex and evolving applications. It offers practical solutions for handling a complicated system of different functions and services within one application.
- The user only needs to scale certain components of the application, which optimizes resource usage to scale a microservices-based application.
- Microservices components are loosely coupled, so they are not interdependent and can be tested individually.
Disadvantages of microservices.
- As the application grows, so does the code base and this may overload your development environment every moment it loads the application. In turn it reduces the developer productivity.
- Sometimes the application may be packaged in one EAR or WAR thus when one wants to change the technology stack of the application might be a challenge.
- On the other hand, if any single application function fails then the entire application goes down. In other scenarios. if a particular function starts consuming more processing power then the entire application, performance can become compromised.
Conclusion
The article has illustrated the difference between monolithic vs microservices architecture. Having said that, you will understand a microservice is basically used to separate a monolithic application into several independent services.