A monolith, or monolithic architecture, is an application where all functionality, such as the interface, business logic and data access, is built, deployed and scaled together as one unit.
Why it matters
Monoliths are simple to develop, test and deploy, and function calls are faster and more reliable than network calls. For small and mid-size products they are often the best choice.
Problems appear when the codebase and team grow: builds slow down, a small change requires a full redeploy, and one faulty module can crash the whole application. Scaling means running more copies of everything.
Example
A WordPress site is a classic monolith: themes, plugins, admin and the public site run in one PHP application on one database. A bug in a single plugin can produce a white screen for the entire site.
Common mistakes
- Believing monolith means badly designed. A modular monolith can be clean and maintainable.
- Moving to microservices solely because it is fashionable.
- Letting modules reach into each other's data, which makes later splitting painful.
Related
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