Microservice Architecture Vs Monolithic Architecture
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The success of a new software product hugely depends on the type of architecture that is adopted by an organization. For many decades the monolithic architecture has been the most widely adopted architecture, however with the recent development of new technologies Microservices architecture has also received huge support especially among the FANG companies.
MONOLITHIC ARCHITECURE.
The name Monolith was adopted from an ancient term that was used to refer to a single block of stone. This architecture categorizes a software product into three distinct but highly interdependent parts: the database, the client side interface and the server side component (backend). The aforementioned parts are unified by a set of functions that ensure seamless communication between each of the sections to achieve the intended goal.
Although this architecture is friendly and easy to adopt among small teams especially in startups, it has also a number of cons;
1. Any developer who intends to make changes to the Codebase must redeploy the new version of the software to the server. This poses a great risk to an organization or business especially if inexperienced developers have to make the changes.
2. Limited reusability of code makes this architecture less efficient.
3. Scaling a Software product based on this architecture can be a time consuming process.
4. In cases of huge products involving millions of lines of code and hundreds of components, it may be overwhelming to manage such a product especially if a company has to hire new inexperienced developers developers.
5. It is also impossible to adopt a new technology without rewriting the whole application from scratch, this is costly in terms of time and money.
Pros of Monolithic Architecture.
Fairly easy to develop and understand even among new developers.
As compared to the Microservice the monolithic architecture experiences less network latency and security related problems.
MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE.
It is a new trend in Software development that adopts DevOps principles where by an application is made up of small services that communicate with each other through various common protocols such as the HTTP. Each component or service is loosely coupled and more often than not each service may run on it own database, this offers more flexibility.
Furthermore, each services is defined by its own functionality but work together through well managed distributed system.
Why You Should Adopt this Architecture.
This architecture offer more:
1. Flexibility as compares to its counterpart, since developers ca n make changes , fix bugs and updates without worrying about the entire application.
2. Increased productivity among Software developers since the ability to develop components independently means that tasks can be distributed equally among a small team of developers.
3. The overall Downtime of a Product in cases such as when making updates or fixing a bug is reduced since this can be resolved by just redeploying a single service without affecting the entire application.
4. Since these services behave as standalone applications that means different programming languages can be adopted when building different services, this improves Scalability and encourages easy adoption of new technologies.
The benefits of Microservice architecture outwheigh those of the monolithic architecture and besides it is a widely discussed topic on different platforms. However, any organization that wants to adopt this model needs to carefully consider whether it suits their needs an whether they have the human resources to adopt it.