Break the monolith

In recent years, the microservices market has grown in response to increasing digitization, technological advancements, and use of connected devices. According to Technavio, the microservices market's potential growth will reach $1.59 billion USD between 2021and 2026.

Monolithic architecture has been the traditional approach for designing software programs. It has benefits such as faster development and testing, but presents a core problem with scaling. Consequently, the application ends up having a large codebase, which poses maintenance, deployment, and modification challenges.

This blog aims to help you understand the benefits of serverless microservices and the advantages of breaking the monolith.   

Why break the monolith model?

Monolith architecture might initially simplify the process of starting a business, but as your business grows, more resources will be required to handle the complexity of your app's code and architecture. That means your company will need to hire more developers. Expanding your business involves breaking boundaries, experimenting, changing, and taking risks, but a monolith model can impede this process.

The monolithic model does have advantages. For instance, it makes it simpler to develop and deploy apps because all components are centralized. Since the codebase is contained in a single repository encompassing multiple projects, testing and debugging are easier.

However, continuous deployment and scaling are challenging, as different modules have overlapping resource requirements. As monolithic applications are tightly coupled, they have high module interdependencies. This means that even a single module failure can cause the entire system to fail.  

Interested in knowing more about how to break the monolith with serverless microservices to iterate faster? Consider attending our Serverless Masterclass.

What is a microservice model?

Microservice involves loosely coupled components that are independent of each other but collaborate to achieve a functionality. Microservices that run on serverless can reduce development time and enhance iterations.

Microservice applications are used to perform background functions. For example, you can perform sentiment analysis and push negative comments as tickets to your custom ticketing portal from any community engagement tool.

How Catalyst helped ConstructionBOS speed up time to market

You can leverage the benefits of a microservice model with serverless architecture when you're building an app hosted in the cloud.

We can look at the case of ConstructionBOS, a construction company based out of Wicklow, Ireland, as an example. The company built a serverless microservice to collect the data they needed from vendors in specific geographical locations using the Catalyst serverless platform. This eventually helped their sales team secure regional data and apply specific filters to locate both live and drill down data on the go. Since the company was using Zoho CRM, the Catalyst CRM Connector Application was able to interact with the data and integrate it with CRM through APIs, keeping everything updated regularly.

Read the case study to learn more

Here are 5 reasons to use microservice over a monolith model

Dynamic scaling

Platforms can become increasingly complex to manage as the demand for your application grows. It's difficult to deploy, scale, and optimize a monolith application. If there are too many code lines in a tightly coupled application, productivity will be limited. Microservice allow you to break monolithic applications into small, diversified services that are easy to manage. Adding new services, deploying more microservice, and improving page load times are easy with the microservice model.

Observability

Microservice provide development teams with the data they need to identify and correct problems as they occur. It is difficult to trace the source of a failure among the many systems running a service. To overcome this problem, serverless platforms like Catalyst offer APM (application performance monitoring) logs, metrics, and much more.

Decentralized and independently deployable

Using one of the many programming languages available today, microservice can be developed to be independent and compatible with their own database. In monolithic systems, the entire functionality of a project is contained within a single codebase, but in a microservice model, each service is autonomous and can control its own logic.

Reduces risk and downtime

If any one of the microservice fails, it will not affect the rest of the application. The rest of the application will continue to function normally.

Agility

When you use microservice, it's easy to add new functionalities and deploy new versions without greatly impacting the entire application.

Build your own serverless microservice today, or receive a free consultation with a solution architect about your current application and the ways it can be modernized.