Amazon Prime Video’s Monolith Success

Have you heard the news about Amazon Prime Video moving from microservices to monolith for their video quality analysis solution? If you have, you might have also seen some posts on social media claiming that microservices are bad and that monoliths are the way to go. But is that really the case?

Microservices are fine. They allow you to divide your software into small, simple components that can function independently. You may modify them whenever you want and with any tools you like. Microservices provide you the freedom and ability to build amazing programs.

However, microservices are not a silver bullet. They come with their own challenges and trade-offs, such as increased complexity, communication overhead, data consistency issues, testing difficulties, and operational costs. They also require careful design and implementation to avoid pitfalls such as tight coupling, performance degradation, and increased failure points.

That’s why choosing the right architecture for your problem domain and technical requirements is important. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution for every application. Sometimes a monolithic design is preferable than a microservices architecture, and vice versa. A mixed approach is sometimes the best solution.

That’s what Amazon Prime Video did. They realized that their microservices and serverless architecture did not benefit their video quality analysis solution. They faced bottlenecks and high costs with AWS Step Functions and Lambda. They also hit a hard scaling limit at only 5% of the expected load. So they decided to move to a monolithic architecture that reduced their infrastructure cost by over 90% and increased their scaling capabilities. They did not abandon microservices altogether but rather optimized their architecture for their specific use case.

This case study demonstrates that while there is nothing wrong with creating microservices, there is something wrong with implementing the incorrect architecture. It also demonstrates the need of being willing to experiment, learn from our mistakes, and be honest and upfront when sharing our experiences with the development community.

What do you think about this case study? Do you agree or disagree with Amazon Prime Video’s decision? Have you ever faced a similar situation in your own projects? How did you choose the right architecture for your application? I'd appreciate hearing your views and comments.