Monolithic Architecture Vs Microservices
In 2009 Netflix faced growing pains. Its infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the demand for its rapidly growing video streaming services. The company decided to migrate its IT infrastructure from its private data centers to a public cloud and replace its monolithic architecture with a microservices architecture. The only problem was, the term “microservices” didn’t exist and the structure wasn’t well-known.
Monolithic Architecture
A monolithic architecture is like a typical restaurant, where all kinds of dishes are prepared in one large kitchen and a single menu is presented to guests to choose from.
In technical aspects we can see like this way.
Suppose you have built a retail web application which contains 3 basic functionalities
1. Shopping Cart
2. Inventory
3. Payment
If these functionalities have been developed in one single code base then we can assure that this retail application follows Monolithic Architecture.
Just as the restaurant offers everything from starters to desserts in one place, a monolith includes all functionalities in one codebase.
Advantages of Monolithic Architecture:
1. Simpler to develop and deploy
2. Easier to test
3. Singular Security management
Disadvantages of Monolithic Architecture:
1. Complex over time
2. Difficult to scale
3. Technology limitations
4. Single point of failure
Microservices
A microservice based architecture is an approach in which applications are broken down into smaller, independent services that communicate with one another through APIs.
Now think about the previous retail application, if we shaped this application into Microservice then one microservice may be used for shopping cart, while a separate microservice will use for payment. Each component can be deployed and scaled independently of the other modules. These modules then communicate with each other through an Application Programming Interface (API) in order to create the full functionality of an application.
Advantage of Microservices
- Agility
2. Flexible scaling
3. Continuous deployment
4. Independently deployable
5. High reliability
Microservices may not be effective for every cases. A legacy monolith may work perfectly well, and breaking it down may not be worth the trouble. But with growing technology and demand of the highly reliable application, microservices architecture can be worthwhile.
Source : Google, Atlassian.
