Microservices vs Monolith: Architectural Patterns

Should you split your app into 20 services from Day 1? (Answer: Probably not).

The Monolith

A single codebase, a single deployment.

• Pros: Easy to develop, easy to deploy, simple transaction management (ACID), simple debugging.
• Cons: Coupling, hard to scale specific parts, single point of failure (if it crashes, everything crashes).

Microservices

Splitting the application into small, independent services communicating via network (HTTP/gRPC).

• Pros: Scalability (scale only what you need), technology agnostic (use Node for IO, Python for AI), fault isolation.
• Cons: Complexity explosion (network latency, distributed data consistency, operational overhead).

Conclusion

“Don’t even consider microservices unless you have a team of 50+ engineers.” - Martin Fowler (Paraphrased). Start with a modular monolith.