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Monolith has become a buzzword. Is any business software actually not a monolith? I mean does it make business sense to re write everything as a microservice?

• jacquesm 10y ago
  As always: it depends. Some organizations would benefit from it because they plan on a trajectory that will cause their software to change repeatedly over a longer period of time. Microservices would make it a lot easier to tackle a portion of the whole and to swap it out with something different, or to remove or add pieces in their entirety. Monolithic software can be quite good when developed with a good understanding of what you want the future to look like. If the future holds more uncertainty such projects tend to become stale and acquire traits usually associated with legacy projects: hard to impossible to maintain or adapt to new roles, no clear interfaces between sub-sections (if those are identifiable at all) and hard to test. So no, it's not for everybody and it's not for everywhere, but when applied properly it can make all the difference between maintaining forward momentum and losing it entirely after only a few years in business. The great power of microservices is they allow a reduction in scope, and that alone is worth quite a bit in the maintenance and understanding departments, in a monolith the whole thing is the scope, and that can kill your ability to reason about a project.