It's time to move away from monolith architecture

Here's why monoliths can be a bottleneck

Hey there 👋 - Amrut here!

Happy Saturday to all working hard towards meta-skills mastery!

In the world of software development, architecture plays a crucial role in the success of an application.

Having worked with monolith architectures for 3+ years, I can say they come with their own set of challenges.

In today’s newsletter, I will explore why monolith architectures can become a bottleneck for fast-growing applications that require improved scalability, flexibility, fault isolation, and faster deployment cycles.

Let’s dive in.

Why Monolith Architectures Become A Bottleneck?

Lack of Scalability

Monolith architectures can be challenging to scale horizontally. As the application grows, handling increased traffic and user demand becomes increasingly challenging.

For example, imagine you have an e-commerce application built as a monolith. As your user base grows and the traffic to your website increases, you need to handle more requests simultaneously.

With a monolith architecture, you would need to scale the entire application, including components that may not require additional resources. This can be inefficient and costly.

Tight Coupling

Monolith architectures often result in tight coupling between different components of the application.

This means that changes in one part of the monolith can have unintended consequences on other parts.

For instance, suppose you want to update the payment processing module of your monolithic e-commerce application. However, this change may inadvertently affect other parts of the system, such as inventory management or order fulfillment, leading to unexpected issues and making it challenging to isolate updates or introduce new features without impacting the entire system.

Limited Technology Flexibility

Monolith architectures typically use a single technology stack throughout the application.

For example, if your monolithic application is built using a specific programming language and framework, you may face limitations when adopting new technologies or frameworks that may be better suited for specific components.

Upgrading or replacing a technology within a monolith can be complex and time-consuming, requiring significant effort to migrate existing code and ensure compatibility.

Longer Deployment Cycles

Monolith architectures tend to have longer deployment cycles due to the need to deploy the entire application together.

Let's say you want to release a new feature or fix a bug in your monolithic application.

Since all components are tightly coupled, you must go through the entire deployment process, including testing and deploying the whole monolith. This can slow down the release of new features and bug fixes, impacting the agility and responsiveness of your development team.

Availability and Fault Isolation

Monolith architectures lack fault isolation.

If one monolith component fails, it can bring down the entire application.

For example, if there is a critical issue with the authentication module of your monolithic application, it can prevent users from accessing any functionality, causing downtime and a poor user experience.

Additionally, scaling individual components based on their specific resource needs is challenging in monolithic systems, making it harder to ensure high availability during peak traffic periods.

Team Collaboration Challenges

Monolith architectures can present collaboration challenges within development teams.

With multiple teams working on different parts of the monolith, coordination and communication become crucial to avoid conflicts and ensure the smooth integration of changes.

For example, if Team A is responsible for the front end and Team B is responsible for the back end, they must coordinate their efforts closely to align their work and avoid introducing compatibility issues or breaking changes.

Testing Complexity

Testing a monolith can be complex and time-consuming.

Due to the tight coupling between components, isolating and testing individual functionalities can be challenging.

For instance, if you want to test a specific feature or behavior in your monolithic application, you may need to set up and execute a comprehensive regression testing suite to ensure overall system integrity. This can slow down the testing process and make identifying and addressing issues harder.

Key takeaways

While monolith architectures have been widely used, they come with several challenges that can hinder scalability, flexibility, and agility.

By considering alternative architectural patterns such as microservices, serverless, or containerization, you can overcome these problems and build more scalable, maintainable, and resilient applications.

It is essential to carefully evaluate the needs of your application and choose the architecture that best aligns with your goals and requirements.

Tweet of the week

So I just highlighted the challenges of using monolith architectures, but look what Amazon did for their Prime Video service? 😲👇

Quote to ponder on

“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.”

  Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor

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