Monolithic Application describes a single-tiered application software and database interface code are combined into a single program and deployed into single platform.
Monolith model deploy all services as single entity in single platform i.e. Monolithic application has single code base with multiple modules.
Consider an example of online retail portal, customer can browse the services through browser and can add products to the cart, order a product, authorize payments, and track shipments. These are different components involved to make single web application that the customer uses to purchase a product.
Monolithic Architecture deploy these components into single unit of application code in single server or platform.
Application code deployment consists below components:
- Catalog
- Order
- Payment
- Shipment
- Tracking
Below Architecture describes the “Monolithic Architecture” view of deploying all service components in single platform as single code or single artifact(.war)
Advantages
- Easy Development – Large scale of IDEs are supporting for Monolithic model of code development hence it is easy for developers to develop the code for application.
- Easy to Test – Testing the application becomes easy as all service components are integrated and working as single piece of software.
- Easy Deployment – Since the entire application services are build and created as single artifact like .war, it is easy to deploy single .war file in application server.
- Easy to scale resources – Since it is single unit of deployment, we can easily create horizontal servers and deploy war on new server and add to the Load balancer to balance & distribute the load.
Disadvantages:
- Maintenance – Monolithic code base is very large and makes complicated to understand for any code changes. For every small change in code of specific component needs to deploy entire code.
- Performance – Application can slows down as initial load time is high to load large scale of code.
- Reliability — Small bug in one component cause failure of whole application.
- Software Upgrade Strategy – Monolithic applications have difficulty to upgrade to latest versions or adopting new technologies as that might conflict to other components in the application.
Challenges with Monolithic Architecture
- Scalability – It is easy to scale computing resources on Monolithic Architecture, but different components might require different capacity of resources hence challenging to provisioning resources satisfying all different components in the single large applications.
- Flexibility – Monolithic Architecture is not flexible for frequent deployments, frequent code changes or releases as every time the whole application needs to be reviewed as its single application code base for all service components.
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