There's absolutely nothing wrong with a monolith for a good majority of applications. If everyone is working on the same core product, there's really not much to be gained by breaking it into microservices, as seen with Github. Microservices are great for exactly that, services, and if your application needs to integrate with tons of other products and your team is the one maintaining those integrations, that's when you need microservices. As an ecosystem, Github really kind-of is built on microservices, they just call them 3rd-party applications. The core of Github is called a monolith just because they aren't the ones maintaining all the other services.
I'm a full stack web developer who has been freelancing for the last 20 years. I write about everything from development to production and also have video courses on my site!
How do you handle traffic scaling for monolith application? Just copy the application in different machine and allow load balancer to distribute traffic?
I'm a full stack web developer who has been freelancing for the last 20 years. I write about everything from development to production and also have video courses on my site!
Vertically scale (add more computing power to a server) and then tinker with your app server's scaling properties. For example with Puma (a popular Rails app server) you can increase its workers and threads which in turn use more system resources.
Horizontally scale (add more servers) and then load balance them like you mentioned.
I'm a full stack web developer who has been freelancing for the last 20 years. I write about everything from development to production and also have video courses on my site!
You can use a load balancer that supports sticky sessions, this way users are always routed to the same server.
Your cache would typically live outside of your application instance. For example with Rails you could use Redis as your cache backend and Redis would be running on its own server that's unrelated to your load balancer.
That's typically what people mean when they say they run "stateless" servers. For horizontally scaling most web applications, you want to keep them as dumb as possible. They should be disposable. I would strive for that even if you plan to do a small single server deployment.
I've dealt with some pretty big web apps before. A single SQL database can go a really really really really long ways as long as you avoid silly mistakes like N+1 queries and understand how to profile slow queries on demand. You can also cache expensive queries to avoid hitting your DB entirely.
Really great post!
As far as I know, GitHub is basically monolithic Rails too. I may be wrong though.
All architectures are simply a point in time. Starting with the ultimate solution is almost always a bad choice.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with a monolith for a good majority of applications. If everyone is working on the same core product, there's really not much to be gained by breaking it into microservices, as seen with Github. Microservices are great for exactly that, services, and if your application needs to integrate with tons of other products and your team is the one maintaining those integrations, that's when you need microservices. As an ecosystem, Github really kind-of is built on microservices, they just call them 3rd-party applications. The core of Github is called a monolith just because they aren't the ones maintaining all the other services.
Thanks. dev.to is also a monolith too right?
It seems to scale just fine with a quick loop on rolling out new features.
Yeah, traffic scaling is not a problem. Team-scaling remains to be seen, but I'm pretty happy with our outlook there.
How do you handle traffic scaling for monolith application? Just copy the application in different machine and allow load balancer to distribute traffic?
A couple of ways.
Vertically scale (add more computing power to a server) and then tinker with your app server's scaling properties. For example with Puma (a popular Rails app server) you can increase its workers and threads which in turn use more system resources.
Horizontally scale (add more servers) and then load balance them like you mentioned.
You could also do a combination of both.
For horizontal, there may be serveral technical issue I think.
For most application, the bottleneck would be in database. I mean the performance.
For the transactional issue, it could be done through pessimistic lock and optimistic lock I think.
For microservice, I often have a question for session. How can I get session info across different microservice component.
You can use a load balancer that supports sticky sessions, this way users are always routed to the same server.
Your cache would typically live outside of your application instance. For example with Rails you could use Redis as your cache backend and Redis would be running on its own server that's unrelated to your load balancer.
That's typically what people mean when they say they run "stateless" servers. For horizontally scaling most web applications, you want to keep them as dumb as possible. They should be disposable. I would strive for that even if you plan to do a small single server deployment.
I've dealt with some pretty big web apps before. A single SQL database can go a really really really really long ways as long as you avoid silly mistakes like N+1 queries and understand how to profile slow queries on demand. You can also cache expensive queries to avoid hitting your DB entirely.
Let's face it... most current mature frameworks and programming langauges just dont adapt with microservices.
I'm talking about Rails and Django :(