Monolithic vs microservices
In the past, we built monolithic applications that ran on dedicated physical servers.
Monolithic application is jargon for a large complicated application that does lots of things. For example, a monolithic application may have all of the following services bundled and shipped as a single program.
- Web front-end
- Authentication
- Shopping basket
- Catalog
- Persistent store
- Reporting
The important thing to understand is that all of these services were developed by a single team, shipped as a single program, installed as a single program, and patched and updated as a single program. This meant they were complex and difficult to work with. For example, patching, updating, or scaling the reporting service of a monolithic app meant you had to patch, update, or scale the entire app. This made almost all changes high-risk, often resulting in updates being rolled up into a single very high-risk update performed once a year over a long stressful weekend...
