Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Using Services

Modern software requires the use of modern application architectures, but what is involved in modern software architectures? One of the keys to architecting highly scaled and highly available applications is to utilize service- or microservice-based architectures. Legacy monolithic application development processes do not provide you the capabilities you need to keep your application running at scale and maintain availability.

Historically, most applications appear as single, large, distinct monoliths. The single monolith encompasses all business activities for a single application. To implement an improved piece of business functionality, an individual developer must make changes within the single application, and all developers making changes must make them within the same single application. Developers can easily step on one another’s toes and make conflicting changes that result in problems and outages.

In a service-oriented architecture, individual services are created that encompass a specific subset of business logic. These individual services are interconnected to provide the entire set of business logic for the application.

Let’s compare monolith and service-oriented architectures and see why service-oriented architectures provide better organizational scalability and application scalability.

The Monolith Application Versus the Service-Based Application

A traditional large monolithic application contains all logic and functionality within a ...