Monolithic Architecture is typically used in the early stages of application development because it allows you to quickly create a Minimum Viable Product and then later work on additional functional requirements.
Advantages of Monolithic System
- Simplicity in Development: As I mentioned earlier, creating an MVP can be implemented quickly.
- Easy Deployment: There are no dependencies, you only need a JAR file to deploy.
- Simplified Debugging Process: For small projects, since everything is in one place, you only need to follow the code flow of a request to identify issues.
- Minimal Network Latency: Because it's all a single common codebase and datastore, network latency and consistency are not factors affecting overall performance.
While using Monolithic architecture has its benefits, at the same time, as traffic increases and the application grows, receiving millions of hits, it becomes advisable to transition to Micro services. This transition is prompted by the drawbacks of the Monolithic architecture becoming evident.
Disadvantages of Monolithic System
- Application Failures: The entire application crashes when one of the modules fails or throws an exception.
- Deployment Complexity: Even a small change requires redeploying the complete application.
- Testing Overhead: Even a minor change triggers running the complete unit tests during deployment.
- CI/CD and Builds: If your application is large in size, building the entire application takes a considerable amount of time.
- Merge Conflicts: Since all developers work on the same application, encountering merge conflicts becomes a frequent possibility.
- Technology Dependency: You are strict to the technologies used in your application, you can't use other tools for new modules even if they are better.
- Database Scaling: The single Database is used for all of the services, we can add read replicas of DB but writes are still a problem which impacts the performance.
- Tight Code Coupling: As your user base increases and modules are tightly coupled, new developers will find it challenging to understand, and dividing responsibilities among multiple teams becomes difficult.
However, few companies prefer to use the Monolithic architecture so that they can maintain stability, for rapid development, and efficient management of their legacy applications because sometimes transitioning to a micro service architecture requires a significant effort in development, infrastructure, costs, testing, etc.
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