From Monolithic to Microservices: How Cloud Hosting Is Powering the Big Shift

[johny899]

Ever try to fix one thing in a complex system but broke five other things? That's what happens with monolithic applications. Monolithic applications worked great for small one-off projects, but when large, complex applications came scalable challenges arose. That's why many organizations choose to deploy microservices frameworks, especially in cloud environments.

Why Monolithic Systems Have Become Problematic​

A monolithic app is developed as one gigantic block. The design, logic and database are all part of a single app. In the beginning everything is simple but as your app becomes large and complex, it becomes a big mess.

If you fix a simple bug in one part of the app, you often need to rebuild everything and restart the whole app, which is not enjoyable.

This is the experience that was frustrating for developers who dislike monolithic systems:

• Slow updates - Whenever you change one thing, you have to rebuild everything.

• Hard to scale - When a part became too slow, it couldn't be scaled independently, so the whole app needed to be scaled.

• Team struggles - If one developer was working on one part of the app and another developer was working on another part, it was hard for them to work concurrently in the same memory space.

It's like having to move an elephant when all you need to do is move its tail!

What Is Microservices​

Now, consider taking that large, cumbersome elephant and splitting it into smaller, more manageable pieces. Each piece does exactly one thing, and simply passes messages to other microservices through an API. That’s essentially what microservices do.

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud allow you to achieve this architecture easily. Each individual microservice runs in its own container, which means you can update, fix, or scale one microservice without impacting any of the others.

Here are benefits of microservices:​

• Easy scaling (i.e., you only need to scale the one microservice that needs more power/timeliness).
• Easy updates (i.e., you can update microservices without needing to stop the whole application).
• More reliable (i.e., when one microservice breaks, other microservices can still become available).

When I assisted moving a small shopping app from a monolith to microservices, the difference was instantanious and dramatic. It felt as if I was switching from taking the slow, socially distance-packed city bus, to taking several fast moving motorcycles - we were simply moving faster now.

But No System Is Without Its Issues​

Of course, microservices have their downsides. It gets complicated when you are managing dozens of small microservices. You have to use software, like Docker, Kubernetes, API gateways, etc. to manage everything.

Also, when your application stops working properly, tracking down the issue can be tricky—it's sort of like following a long "tracing" chain.

To Wrap it Up​

The transition from a monolithic application to a microservice architecture in cloud infrastructure is no longer a fad — it simply makes sense in a software to build applications today! Microservices make applications faster, more maintainable, and more adaptable.

In addition, developers are able to work with relative freedom, with "impact" only occurring (and potentially an impact on the project) when they deploy their specific service or part of the application in the cloud. Though it requires some setup, once you see how smoothly it all runs, I can't imagine going back to the cumbersome monolithic applications we used to develop.

So - if you think about it, would you choose a large block of applications, or smaller services?