Moving away from the Monolith — Monoliths are… OK?

Kind of a strange title, right? I mean, we’re supposed to be moving away from monolithic architectures… so, are monoliths ever OK in…

Kind of a strange title, right? I mean, we’re supposed to be moving away from monolithic architectures… so, are monoliths ever OK in today’s modern, cloud-driven world?

You don’t often hear about successful efforts to decompose a set of microservices into a monolith. That’s not a typo. It’s a pretty famous write up on how Amazon moved from a distributed services based infrastructure to a monolith and reduced costs 90%. It led to a lot of controversy, about how microservices must be awful since Amazon, arguably the king of lambda architecture, couldn’t do it. In fact, the article described moving from a poorly optimized, wasteful architecture to one that was smarter about consuming resources — but was still microservice based, just leaning on some positive aspects of monolithic design.

Monoliths do have a lot going for them. And they’ve been around a long time, running a lot of things in the world. There’s a certain sense of permanence to the monolith — in no small part because they tend…