Microservices vs Monolith

It’s an age-old question. Or at least a couple years old.

Microservice architectures are certainly popular. But are they better than monolithic architectures? Which direction should you go if you’re embracing DevOps?

The truth is…

it doesn’t really matter!

Both approaches have certain benefits, and both have certain drawbacks. And for a large majority of applications out there, those benefits and drawbacks exactly cancel each other out. That’s because, at a basic level, the difference between the two is a question of where do you want to manage your dependencies?

Generally speaking, the dependencies are the same. They’re just handled at a different part of the software delivery life cycle.

So unless you’re building an application where one architecture pattern provides clear and immediate benefits, choose whichever pattern you and your team are most comfortable with (which probably means a monolith for most teams these days). Besides, a well-designed monolith can fairly easily have microservices split off of it as business requirements change.