Monolithic Software Architecture
What is Software Architecture?
According to Wikipedia, it says that “Software architecture refers to the fundamental structures of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.”
There are many Software Architectural patterns. Of them now I am going to make a description of Monolithic Software Architecture.
Monolithic Architecture Pattern
Monolithic Architecture pattern, which is the traditional architectural style that is still a good choice for many applications. A monolithic application describes a single-tiered software application in which the user interface and data access code are combined into a single program from a single platform. A monolithic application is self-contained and independent from other computing applications.
Such a monolithic server is a natural way to approach building such a system. All your logic for handling a request runs in a single process, allowing you to use the basic features of your language to divide up the application into classes, functions, and namespaces. With some care, you can run and test the application on a developer’s laptop, and use a deployment pipeline to ensure that changes are properly tested and deployed into production. You can horizontally scale the monolith by running many instances behind a load-balancer.
Monolithic applications can be successful, but increasingly people are feeling frustrations with them — especially as more applications are being deployed to the cloud . Change cycles are tied together — a change made to a small part of the application, requires the entire monolith to be rebuilt and deployed. Over time it’s often hard to keep a good modular structure, making it harder to keep changes that ought to only affect one module within that module. Scaling requires scaling of the entire application rather than parts of it that require greater resources.
Pros of using Monolithic Architecture:
- Simple to develop.
- Simple to test. For example you can implement end-to-end testing by simply launching the application and testing the UI with Selenium.
- Simple to deploy. You just have to copy the packaged application to a server.
- Simple to scale horizontally by running multiple copies behind a load balancer.
Cons of using Monolithic Architecture:
- This simple approach has a limitation in size and complexity.
- Application is too large and complex to fully understand and made changes fast and correctly.
- The size of the application can slow down the start-up time.
- You must redeploy the entire application on each update.
- Impact of a change is usually not very well understood which leads to extensive manual testing.
- Continuous deployment is difficult.
- Monolithic applications can also be difficult to scale when different modules have conflicting resource requirements.
- Another problem with monolithic applications is reliability. Bug in any module (e.g. memory leak) can potentially bring down the entire process. Moreover, since all instances of the application are identical, that bug will impact the availability of the entire application.
- Monolithic applications has a barrier to adopting new technologies. Since changes in frameworks or languages will affect an entire application it is extremely expensive in both time and cost.
Thank you everyone for visiting my article and hope you got some idea of Monolithic Architecture by reading this.
I will write more articles on Micro Services and hope to compare Monolithic Architecture with Micro Services architecture.
