Rendering and architecture · Comparison
Monolith vs microservices
One deployable application or many small ones. The choice is less about technology than about team size and how independently the parts of a product need to change.
2 options · 8 questions side by side · updated
| Compare | Monolith | Microservices |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | One codebase, one deployment | Many services, deployed separately |
| Database | Usually one shared database | Each service owns its data |
| Calls between features | Function calls, fast and reliable | Network calls that can fail |
| Scaling | The whole app scales together | Each service scales on its own |
| Team fit | One team or a few | Many independent teams |
| Operations | Simple: one thing to monitor | Heavy: tracing, orchestration, many pipelines |
| Cost to start | Low | High |
| Main risk | Tangled code as it grows | Distributed complexity too early |
How to choose between Monolith and Microservices
- Start with a monolith, ideally a modular one with clear internal boundaries.
- Split out a service when one part has clearly different scaling needs or a team needs to release on its own.
- Move to microservices broadly only when team size, not technology, makes the monolith the bottleneck.
The options
- MonolithAn application built and deployed as one unit, with all its features in a single codebase and usually one database. It is the usual starting point for new products.
- MicroservicesAn architecture that splits an application into many small services, each owning one business area, running separately and talking to the others over the network.
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