What is Monolithic architecture and Microservice architecture?

What is monolithic architecture?

So in monolithic architecture, we have a huge single code base built on a single large server.

This type of architecture is deployed all at once, i.e. on both frontend and backend together.

Even if there is a change in a specific component, you need to redeploy the whole application.

If we talk about scaling, we need to launch multiple big instances in monolithic application to serve the need, even if the small part of the component is a resource-intensive. This leads to wastage of resources.

This architecture is designed in such a way that all components share a memory here, it's faster than having inter-process communication (IPC).

Operational overload is comparatively less, as having one big application means there’s only one application you need to set up logging, monitoring, testing for.

What is Microservices architecture?

I will start with an example here, I have my business application running on 3 components:-

Payment

Customer Support

Inventory

So in a microservice architecture, there is a separate container for each component.

In case the Customer Support component goes down, or needs upgrade/fix the component, this architecture makes sure that the rest of the other components are all up and running.

In microservice architecture an application is dissected to different components, and each application components are developed individually, packaged individually, and deployed individually, in individual processes.

Microservice architectures are typically better organized, since each microservice has a very specific job, and is not concerned with the jobs of other components.

Components in microservices communicate with each other using HTTP and REST APIs.

Here in this architecture you can easily assign memory or compute for specific components if that component is memory or CPU intensive (yes I am talking about the hard limit and soft limit).