Microservices vs Monolith: which is the best choice?

In software engineering, Both MONOLITH & M I C R O-service are two types of application architecture used to define the software programs. Coming to Monolithic- which is a traditional unified model to design a software program that aggregates every module into a single platform. On the other hand, Microservice is an application architecture that takes every application’s functions that puts its own services, and these services are deployed in containers, and these containers are communicating through APIs.

Note: This article focuses on Micro-service architecture. To better understand Microservice, let’s compare it to a Monolithic.

Monolithic

Monolithic is a traditional unified model to design software programs. The monolithic architecture describes a single tired application in which different components are combined together from a single platform.  For example, consider a monolithic E-commerce application. It might contain a customer authorization part, order taking, cart checking, payment authorization, and shipments component.

Benefits

• Easy to develop and implement in a project
• Framework, templates, and scripts are applied without many difficulties
• Product deployment is very simple
• Have simple testing approaches(Testing UI with Selenium)

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Drawbacks 

• Modules & components are tightly coupled
• Difficult to manage with large application
• Each modification needs a redeployment
• Limited scalability
• Difficult to adopt new technology for a particular functionality

Microservice

Micro-service is a software architecture that allows you to divide a system into n number of modules. Each module has specific business goals and they are communicating with different other services. Based on the functionality they are breakdown into multiple modules(i.e. loosely coupled modules). Instead of monolithic architecture, each microservice has its own databases and communication channel enables by the APIs between these modules.

Benefits

• Better for large complex applications 
• Enables continuous adaptations and delivery without affecting other modules
• Ease of updations without affecting other modules
• Provide better testing experiences
• Lightweight & loosely coupled modules(Minimal dependencies)
• Increase module re-usability
• Dynamic scaling

Drawbacks

• Difficulty to maintain a large number of service
• Developers must deal with additional complexity
• More complexity in deployment
• Increased memory consumption
• Need more collaboration in development for better productivity
• Transaction management little bit painful

At the end

Like everything both Monolithic and Micro services have their own advantages and disadvantages.  The monolithic architecture will be the right choice for smaller applications like simple eCommerce, blogs, etc. On the other hand, if you plan to develop highly complicated applications Microservice architecture will be the right choice. It offers an effective solution to your need. At the same time, you need to consider some other facts such as whether your team has experience in microservice and whether your application boundaries are clearly defined or not.