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Why would you not be able to scale a monolith? You can apply the same principles to it: "[Stick] a load balancer in front of a micro service and scaling based
by lgunsch 10y ago
Why would you not be able to scale a monolith? You can apply the same principles to it: "[Stick] a load balancer in front of a micro service and scaling based on measured load"?
A microservices allows you to scale up very particular components of an architecture, but there is nothing stopping a monolith from being horizontally scaled in just the same way. In AWS, I would make the monolith deployed with an AMI in an auto-scaling group with a load balancer in front.
- sbov 10y agoYeah, scaling app code is generally a solved problem: shared nothing with some load balancers. It doesn't work for every problem, but the above has been standard in my circles for at least a decade by now. Databases are trickier though.
- robotresearcher 10y agoMultiple instances with shared nothing is the opposite of a monolith, by definition.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anamexis 10y agoNot if they're all running the same code.
- robotresearcher 10y agoOK, I looked up the definition of monolithic application in a couple of places, and the meaning is not quite what I thought it was. I thought it was 'one app does everything for everybody' but it's more like 'one app does everything for somebody', so the horizontal scaling applies, and my previous comment is wrong. It's a shame that a 'monolith' application doesn't just mean a genuine singleton, though, as that would be the perfect name for it. A bank of load-balanced monoliths should be a polylith.
- sbov 10y agoI'm not sure if it's a useful distinction, because when you think you're building a 'monolithic' app you might actually be building a 'polylithic' app. Beyond that, in a lot of instances you have to make very few tradeoffs to go from 'monolith' to 'polylith'. By your definition, most rails/django apps are probably polyliths.
- StabbyCutyou 10y agoAuthor here - Came to reply with basically what you just said. Thanks for giving it a read!