As the popularity of Microservices and fine-grained services grows, is this truly the end of Monolith?
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Monolith architecture has been very successful in shaping the software world the way we see it today. However, the last few years have seen a sharp decline in its adoption, especially with the advent of Microservices. The popularity of microservices was caused by the need for scalability and changeability which in turn is caused by the penetration of IT in almost every entity, animate or inanimate. Modern applications see no boundary when it comes to scaling and these applications are fond of change and this is where Monolith doesn’t fit at all. Microservices, at least in theory, is “The Silver Bullet” that will solve all the problems and will serve humankind till eternity, but it doesn’t happen. Microservices bring lots of challenges that were nonexistent earlier. Still, what it does, it does it beautifully and efficiently and most importantly serves the purpose. The popular idea is to have very fine-grained services where each service is responsible for a single task. Practitioners give a contempt look to coarse-grained services as it is deemed against the philosophy of Microservices and this is where Monolith is left for a slow death. Is monolith really that bad and if so then how it was one of the most successful architecture for years? Fine-grained microservices have their own challenges e.g. transactions or latency. To make matters worse, the management overhead is overwhelming, and agreeing to the fine-ness is no easy job. Fine-grained microservices are preferred because there is no single point of failure, the possibility to scale independently, the ability to change and deploy often, and the list goes on.
