Although a monolithic architecture may work for some applications, as applications grow in size and complexity, there are serious drawbacks. Monolithic applications greatly inhibit the agility of the organization as it becomes difficult to make changes to the software. One aspect of this is the fact that continuous deployment is difficult to achieve. Even if a change is made to only one component of a monolithic application, the entire software system will need to be deployed. Organizations are required to devote more resources, such as time and testers, to deploy a new version of a monolithic application.
If the application is small, it can be easy to maintain due to the simplicity of the architecture. However, larger and more complex monolithic applications start to suffer in terms of maintainability. Tightly coupled components make it more difficult to make changes because a change in one part of the application is more likely to affect other parts of the application.
The large codebase of a monolithic application can make it difficult for team members to understand it. This is especially true for new team members as they attempt to become familiar with it and begin working with it.
Even loading a large, monolithic application into an integrated development environment (IDE) and working with it can be frustrating due to slower performance of the IDE. It also takes longer for such applications to start up, lowering the productivity of the team during development.
Monolithic applications require a commitment to a particular programming language and technology stack. Since the application is written as a single unit, it makes it more difficult to introduce different types of technology. In some cases, it can even make it difficult to move to a newer version of the same technology! If a migration to a different technology is needed, it requires the organization to commit to rewriting the entire application.
Larger and more complex applications benefit from dividing responsibilities up among multiple development teams, such as having each team focus on a particular functional area. However, this becomes difficult to do with a monolithic application as changes made by one development team may affect another development team.
Due to these drawbacks, software applications that are large and complex should move away from being a monolithic application. MSA and serverless architecture are alternatives to monolithic architectures. They address some of the concerns and limitations of monolithic applications.