Difference between Microservices and Monolithic Architecture

Decoding Architectural Paradigms: Microservices vs. Monolithic Structure

Hello guys, one of the common questions in Java developer interviews for senior and experienced developers is, “difference between the monolith and Microservice architecture?”. With the growing popularity of Microservices, I am seeing more and more questions from Microservices on Java Interviews and this is one of the starter questions.

While both Monolith and Microservices are two different architectural styles for building software applications, there are quite a lot of differences between them.

In case of monolith architecture, your entire application is packaged and deployed together while in case of Microservices architecture an application is broken into a collection of small, independent services that communicate with each other over a network, mostly over HTTP.

Each service is responsible for a specific business capability and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This makes it easier to make changes to the application without affecting other parts of the system.

Microservices also enable applications to be developed and deployed faster, and they are better suited to large and complex applications where different parts of the application may need to evolve at different speeds.

Btw, Microservices are not silver bullets, there are debugging and troubleshooting issues with Microservices because application log files are scattered across multiple services also for latency-sensitive applications, Microservices are not a good choice because they increase latency.

Now that we are familiar with the basic idea of Microservices and Monolithic architecture, it’s time to deep dive and see the pros and cons of both software architectures.