The Hidden Cost of Healthcare Data Blackouts: An Engineering Perspective.
With the advent of the latest technologies, digital transformation has become essential for businesses of various sizes, from startups to enterprises. If you want to beat the competition, you should consider whether serverless technology is emerging and how the app is evolving.
The exact architectural style you are trying to adopt for the app depends on the business’s needs. However, microservices and monoliths are regarded as the predominant architectural styles. To understand what is important for your business, you should understand the primary differences between microservices and monolithic architecture.
What are Microservices?
Speaking of the microservice architecture, all the app’s components are divided into loosely coupled and independently coupled modules, each with unique functions. Every service and module comes with its own logic, repository, and deployment process. Different independent services interact through different interprocess communication mechanisms, called APIs.
Such modularity focuses on more agility and scalability. Hence, microservices are an alternative to monolithic approaches. As the services are known to be autonomous, it becomes easy to update and replace different individual services and spin up additional services as demand increases. As scalability becomes a major concern, business enterprises opt for the microservice approach.
Pros of microservice architecture
Independent deployments
Microservices play an integral role in streamlining operations, primarily if the business enterprise is divided into smaller teams with unique domains. One of the primary advantages is the ability to deploy services independently. Developers can push updates or changes without having to redeploy the entire application.
Flexible tech stack
Microservices are regarded as language-agnostic, offering the developer team the freedom to deploy different services independently. Hence, you do not need to deploy the entire app for each small update.
Simplified upgrades and innovation
The services operate independently. Teams can adopt newer technologies or frameworks gradually. This modularity simplifies version upgrades and enables continuous innovation at a more granular level.
Cons of microservice architecture
Now, we are going to talk about the cons of microservice architecture. Check it out!
Troubleshooting and testing
Due to the dependencies’ dynamic nature and microservices, deployments can be faster. However, recreating the environments for testing can be a major challenge.
Distributed service management
With the app’s growth, you will be able to create many services. Managing such services and their dependencies becomes overwhelming without the proper tools. In this regard, you need the right DevOps team to handle different aspects of the service, such as deployment and programming.
Obstacles to the bulk changes
If you want to make sweeping changes to the services, you should update each one individually. This is completely doable, but it requires more development time.
What is Monolith?
A monolith is a software architecture where all components of the application, user interface, business logic, and data handling are tightly integrated into a single codebase and deployed as one unit. It’s the traditional way applications have been built, before the rise of cloud-native patterns and DevOps-driven delivery cycles.
Pros of monolithic architecture
Operational simplicity
Monoliths are straightforward to develop, test, and deploy, especially for early-stage products or smaller teams. With everything under one roof, you avoid the complexity of managing distributed systems or inter-service communication.
Faster execution
Internal method calls and shared memory access make monoliths faster regarding raw performance compared to microservices that rely on network calls between services.
Centralized management
Debugging, logging, and monitoring are simpler in a monolithic setup. There’s a single pipeline for testing, deployment, and rollback, which reduces the cognitive load on teams, particularly useful when DevOps maturity is low.
Cons of monolithic architecture
Scalability bottlenecks
You can’t scale individual components independently. If just one module needs more compute resources, you still have to scale the entire application, often leading to inefficient resource usage.
Deployment risk
Small changes, like updating a button label or fixing a minor bug, require full redeployment. This increases the risk of regressions and slows down release velocity.
Differences between Monolithic and Microservices
Now, we will tell you about the differences between monolithic and microservices. Check it out!
1. Security
Microservices architecture:
The threat is widely spread across individual services. The whole app will usually function once the module is under attack. There are specific sites for attacks. Hence, the software development teams should carefully consider every service’s security. As APIs and third-party integrations are essential parts of the services, encryption and authentication protocols are considered crucial choices.
Monolithic architecture:
When it comes to monolithic architecture, the entire app will be at risk once it is under an attack. The traditional firewall offers sufficient protection for the smaller monolith. However, complicated and larger apps are more vulnerable.
2. Deployment
Microservice architecture:
The modularity of the microservices architecture provides scope for the individual services’ independent deployments. Developers can update or roll back individual services without redeploying the entire application. Loose coupling supports rolling deployments, enabling zero-downtime releases.
Monolithic architecture:
A monolith runs from a single codebase, making it simpler to build and deploy, especially in early stages. It indicates that the developers will be capable of enjoying a simpler workflow. Changes in the single components affect the entire app, leading to the risks of unexpected behavior and bugs during change deployment.
3. Scaling and performance
Microservice architecture:
The microservice serverless architecture boasts a distributed nature, which makes it more scalable with a rise in demand. Autoscaling can be applied at a granular level, optimizing performance during peak loads. Using tools such as Kubernetes, you can seek insights into the components’ performance.
Monolithic architecture:
Due to tightly coupled components, monoliths are harder to scale. Scaling often means duplicating the entire application, which is resource-intensive and costly. As features accumulate, maintaining performance becomes increasingly difficult. However, monoliths can sometimes offer more stable performance since there’s no network overhead or dependency on third-party APIs, which reduces the chance of latency or failure propagation.
4. Costs
Microservice architecture:
Microservices, on the other hand, have a huge upfront cost, but their scalability makes them an affordable choice.
Monolithic architecture:
Monoliths have a reduced upfront cost, but they are expensive to scale and develop.
Choosing between Monolith vs Microservices
If you are encountering operational problems with massive teams to manage the unrelatable features in a similar codebase, it is important to break such features into microservices, thereby splitting the team. It provides the best opportunity for the serverless development company to become professionals in the service.
If you are equipped with a smaller development team that works closely together, it is easier to choose the monolith over the sprawling and distributed system of different dependencies and microservices.
Choose microservices when:
- You’re dealing with large teams and struggling to manage unrelated features in a shared codebase
- You want to split the teams and services for better ownership and specialization
- You need flexibility and scalability across services \
Choose monolith when:
- Your development team is small and collaborates closely
- You’re building a simple app and want faster time to market
- You prefer a unified codebase to avoid managing distributed dependencies
- You anticipate frequent updates and upgrades and want to simplify deployment
