Monolithic

Notes:

• A company may have more than one monolith

• A monolith means a big heavy app

Pros:

• Knowledge Sharing

• Easier dependency management

• Easier version management

• Easier to track breakages across different projects

• Easier to know what team is doing at a glance

Cons:

• Harder to split code ownership

• Harder to define responsibilities

• Monolithic codebases can easily become a mess

  • No strong conventions

  • Can be harder to deploy

• Increased complexity on codebase

• Harder to distinguish responsibility of the codebase

• A single release cycle where all components are released togther

Examples:

• Facebook

  • Only WWW is a monolithic app

Questions:

• When should you break down a monolithic app?

• When should you unbundle a monolith?

Resources:

• David R. Maclver: Why you should use a single repository for all your company’s projects

  • It is impossible for your code to get out of sync with itself

  • Any change can be considered and reviewed as a single atomic unit

  • Refactoring to modularity becomes cheap