With the recent blog post from AWS saying they have ditched microservices and returned to the monolith, the old war of monolith vs. microservices has reignited.
In a recent InfoQ article, Ashley Davis asked about your position on this. Are you team microservices or team monolith? What if the distinction was a fantasy and people were fighting over fiction: microservices vs. monolith is just one part of the bigger story.
The article from AWS has been taken as evidence that the company (as a longtime proponent of microservices) has backflipped on microservices and returned to the monolith.
Despite the title of their blog post being calculated to get attention, the article seems to be about their conversion from functions as a service to what is now arguably a microservices architecture, if not a distributed application with services that are larger than micro (however you define micro).
This is just one team at AWS acknowledging that their first attempt at an architecture didn't work out (over time), so they tried a different architecture, and it worked better. But so what? This is just the usual way that good software development should work.
We all want to focus on what’s most important: doing the right thing for our customers. Taking sides in the debate of microservices vs. monolith gets in the way of that. Sometimes, we need microservices. Sometimes, we need a monolith. Most of the time, we are better off somewhere between these extremes.
We can stop our journey to microservices somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, referred to as "the hybrid model". At this point, we might have some big services mixed up with some smaller services. We can have the best of both worlds: the simplicity and convenience of the monolith combined with the flexibility and scalability of microservices.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Ashley David, "The False Dichotomy of Monolith vs. Microservices".
To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "Architecture and Design", "Microservices", and "Modularity" on InfoQ.
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