Do we need to redesign every monolithic application to Microservices?
Amarjeet Singh
Practice Lead Data & GenAI | Sogeti Global Chief Architect at Capgemini
As of today, there is a big pressure on every organization to have an edge on competition to exist and grow further. For any organizations to be relevant and effective, their existing software application requires to change and enable new business models to hold the customer base with them. Adopting a new business model on an existing monolithic application would need the existing business process changes.
Modifying the existing business processes running on monolithic applications is not easy and would have challenges like:
- Even a small change forces full application release
- Long bug fixing cycles due to tight coupling of application modules
- Wide testing scope to zero in any bugs in production
- Longer release cycles even for a small change
- High cost of change implementation
Another issue encountered in the case of monolithic applications is scaling it up and down due to seasonal loads on applications, key factors are as below:
- No flexibility to scale a priority module up & down
- Scaling all application modules i.e. priority & nonpriority due to tight coupling is an added cost
Microservices is the design approach which is being considered widely to have a futuristic design and a solution to mitigate all the above-mentioned monolithic application challenges. Therefore, the point which should be noted is whenever a Microservices design for a given monolithic application is being proposed there should be proper reasons for it.
With all these limitations there are still scenarios where a monolithic application always has an edge on microservice design. A well-designed monolithic application always performs much better than loosely coupled application as it has all the functionality packaged within a single deployable unit. A given scenario should meet all the valid scenarios for a monolithic application to re-designed as a Microservices application and this is where architects needs to play their role to take right design decisions.