Exploring monolithic and microservice architectures

In this section, we will discuss briefly what an application is and some traditional architectural models—monoliths and microservices—as well as their advantages and drawbacks. We will also discuss some challenges when dealing with monoliths and microservices in cloud environments.

We talk a lot about applications in this book, but as this term is a bit plastic, we should keep an eye on what an application could be for us. When we’re tapping and swiping around our mobile devices, we often use the term app. So, in the mobile context, an app is a piece of software that enhances the capabilities of our device. In a more traditional sense, on our desktop/laptop, an application is very similar to an app and is often written in a very monolithic approach. Therefore, we call things such as our development environment an application, and things that run in the background a service or daemon.

In the context of this...