Have Microservices killed the monolithic architecture? Maybe not!

Microservices have been growing in popularity since the past few years, 2014 to be precise. Honestly speaking they weren’t that popular until around 2016 - take a look at the steep rise in the curve. The outbreak has happened over the past few years and there are quite a few factors contributing to their growth, like the cloud, distributed architectures, etc.

Source: Google Trends

Microservices allow for a clearer and refined architecture, with services built to work in isolation, without affecting the resilience and robustness of the application in any way. But does that mean that the Monolith is dead and only Microservices reign? Let’s find out, shall we?

Those of you who participated in this year’s survey, I thank you for taking the time out to share such valuable information. For those of you who don’t know what the survey is all about, it a thing that we do every year, where thousands of developers, architects, managers, admins, share their insights with us, and we share our findings with the community.

This year’s survey was as informative as the last, if not more! We had developers tell us so much about what they’re doing, where they see technology heading and what tools and techniques they use to stay relevant at what they do.

So we took the opportunity and asked our respondents a question about the topic under discussion.

Source: WWE.com

Revelations

If I asked a developer in 2018, what they thought would be the response, they’d instantly say that a majority would be for microservices.

Source: Packtpub Skill Up Survey 2018

If you were the one who guessed the answer was going to be Yes, give yourself a firm pat on the back! It’s great to see that 1,603 people are throwing their hands up in the air and building microservices. On the other hand, it’s possible that it’s purely their manager’s decision (See how this forms a barrier to achieving business goals). Anyway, I was particularly concerned about the remaining 314 people who said ‘No’ (those who skipped answering, now is your chance to say something in the comments section below!).

Why no Microservices?

I thought I’d analyse the possibilities as to why one wouldn’t want to use the microservices pattern in their application architecture. It’s not like developers are migrating from monoliths to microservices, just because everyone else is doing it. Like any other architectural decision, there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration before making the switch. So here’s what I thought were some reasons why developers are sticking to monoliths.

#1 One troll vs many elves: Complex times

Well imagine you could be attacked by one troll or a hundred house elves. Which situation would you choose to be in if neither isn’t an option? I don’t know about you, but I’d choose the troll any day! Keeping the troll’s size aside, I’d be better off knowing I had one large enemy in front of me, rather than being surrounded by a hundred miniature ones.

The same goes for microservices. More services means more complexity, more issues that could crop up. For developers, more services means that they would need to run or connect to all of them on their machine. Although there are tools that help solve this problem, you have to admit that it’s a task to run all services together as a whole application. On the other hand, Ops professionals are tasked to monitor and keep all these services up and running.

#2 We lack the expertise

Let alone having Developer Rockstars or Admin Ninjas (Oops, I shouldn’t be using those words now, find out why), if your organisation lacks experienced professionals, you’ve got a serious problem. What if there’s an organisation that has been having issues developing/managing a monolith itself. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to manage a microservices based application more effectively. It’s a matter of the organisation having enough hands on skills needed to perform these tasks. These skills are tough to acquire and it’s not simple for organisations to find the right talent.

#3 Tower of Babel: Communication gaps

In a monolith, communication happens within the application itself and the network channels exist internally. However, this isn’t the case for a microservices architecture as inter-service communication is necessary to keep everything running in tandem. This results in the generation of multiple points of failure, complicating things. To minimise failure, each service has a certain number of retries when trying to establish communication with another. When scaled up, these retries add a load on the database, what with communication formats having to follow strict rules to avoid complexity back again. It’s a vicious circle!

#4 Rebuilding a monolith

When you build an application based on the microservices architecture, you may benefit a great deal from robustness and reliability. However, microservices together form a large, complicated system, which can be managed by orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Although, if individual teams are managing clusters of these services, it’s quite likely that orchestration, deployment and management of such a system will be a pain.

#5 Burning in dependency hell

Microservices are notorious for inviting developers to build services in various languages and then to glue them together. While this is an advantage to a certain extent, it complicates dependency management in the entire application. Moreover, dependencies get even more complicated when versions of tools don’t receive instantaneous support as they are updated. You and your team can go crazy keeping track of versions and dependencies that need to be managed to maintain smooth functioning of your application.

So while the microservice architecture is hot, it is not always the best option and teams can actually end up making things worse if they choose to make the change unprepared. Yes, the cloud does benefit much more when applications are deployed as services, rather than as a monolith, but the renowned/infamous “lift and shift” method still exists and works when needed.

Ultimately, if you think past the hype, the monolith is not really dead yet and is in fact still being deployed and run in several organisations.

Finally, I want to stress that it’s critical that developers and architects take a well informed decision, keeping in mind all the above factors, before they choose an architecture. Like they say, “With great power comes great responsibility”, that’s exactly what great architecture is all about, rather than just jumping on the bandwagon.

Building Scalable Microservices

Why microservices and DevOps are a match made in heaven

What is a multi layered software architecture?