Let me announce contenders. In the red corner is a former title champion in a super heavyweight category — Mr. Monolith. In the blue corner is a you

Monolith vs. Microservices. The battle of the century

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2021-08-26 00:00:07

Let me announce contenders. In the red corner is a former title champion in a super heavyweight category — Mr. Monolith. In the blue corner is a young and pumped-up gang of microservices in a featherweight category.

I saw several serious monoliths in my life. One of them had about 5+ hours of build time, and the company had to build their own CI to keep moving forward.

On the other hand, I saw people u sing a microservices architecture. They needed 17 load balancers to get their pre-Alpha application up and running. The fun part is that it was before the time of infrastructure as a code, so it was a really high number.

If you asked me about five years ago, I would say by default that the monolith is evil and microservices are good (and I would quote all standard things). However, the hands-on experience of these years taught me that going the microservices route may easily backfire.

Let me skip talking about monolith problems (it doesn’t make sense to beat the dead horse). And let me concentrate a bit on the issues with microservices.