Tech blogs praise microservices, yet many successful products still run on a monolith. For SMEs, the choice of architecture affects speed, cost and who you need to hire.
Here we compare the two and give a short checklist to decide which suits your stage.
Choose the architecture that speeds up delivery today and tomorrow.
Monolith: simplicity first
One codebase and one deployment means less to run and look after, which suits an early product well.
Microservices: scale and flexibility
Teams own their services end to end and release them independently, but at the cost of the complexity that comes with a distributed system.
What to weigh up
- The size and skills of your team
- How often you need to release
- What you’ll need to connect to in future
Architecture should serve the business, not trends. The right choice depends on your team’s experience and how you expect to grow.
If you’re deciding how to structure a new system, or whether to split up an existing one, tell us about it and we’ll give you a straight answer. There’s more on how we approach software development.