Monolithic and Microservice architectures

Monolithic

All code contained in the same repository, same set of nodes in a cluster responsible for handling any possible application request.

In a monolithic architecture, all features and functionalities are integrated into a single, unified codebase, often deployed as a single application.

Advantages:

• Simple architecture, no need to do complex architecture design in advance
• Low deployment cost, just package the whole project on tomcat server
• Simple to scale - we can scale the application by running multiple copies of the application behind a load balancer

Disadvantage: High coupling, difficult to maintain and upgrade. Also, complex projects with many modules take a long time to compile and package.

Microservice Architecture:

Definition: Microservices divide an application into a collection of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific functionality and communicating via APIs or messaging.

Advantages:

• Reduced coupling, each module has less code and does not affect each other after the service is split.
• Facilitates service upgrade and expansion
• Increase maintainability, fault tolerance.

Disadvantage: Service splitting makes deployment complex and introduce the following problems