4 ms·
How does a properly designed microservice architecture not achieve greater scalability over a monolith? Of course you can scale up a monolith but with microserv
by marktolson 8y ago
How does a properly designed microservice architecture not achieve greater scalability over a monolith? Of course you can scale up a monolith but with microservices you can independently scale selected services thus increasing your benefit cost ratio.
- macintux 8y agoThere's a great deal of overhead when communicating between services that isn't typically present in a more tightly-integrated monolith. Networks are very, very slow relative to RAM, setting aside the other costs involved in serializing/deserializing every communication. And "properly designed" is very hard to achieve. It's often much more productive to start with a monolith and experience the pain of extracting a piece that needs horizontal scaling, than to start by horizontally scaling everything. Microservices can be a good architecture, but it's far from a no-brainer, even for high scalability. Servers are incredibly fast these days and can typically scale very well vertically.