Monoliths, Modular Monoliths, and Microservices: A Developer's Reflection
After working on different projects: some small, others growing fast. I’ve been forced to ask myself:
“What’s the right architecture for where I am?”
Along that journey, I’ve had the chance to explore all three key approaches: Monoliths, Modular Monoliths, and Microservices, especially in a Dockerized environment.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand from actually building with them:
🧱 Monoliths –> Start Simple
A monolith is a single codebase where all your logic/APIs, services, UI; lives and is deployed together.
For most early-stage apps, especially solo-built ones:
- ✅ Easy to start, build, test, and deploy
- ✅ Less overhead
- 🚫 Doesn’t scale well with growing complexity
It works great for early MVPs where the focus is speed over long-term structure.
🧩 Modular Monolith –> The Sweet Spot for Many
A modular monolith keeps everything in one repo and process but divides functionality into clear, separate modules / apps.
Think: purchases, sales, payments as independent Django apps within one project.
Why it works well for me:
- Modules are independently testable
- If
paymentsfail,salesstill work - It is easier to onboard new devs into a single repo
- And when scaling comes into the picture, extracting a module into a microservice is painless
This structure hit a sweet spot: Clean enough to grow, simple enough to deploy.
🔗 Microservices –> Powerful, but Heavy
Later, I interacted with projects built entirely as microservices:
- Each module had its own repo
- Each service had its own runtime
- Services talked over REST or messaging systems
This enables:
- 🚀 Independent scaling
- 👥 Team autonomy
- 🔄 Service-specific deployments
But comes at a cost:
- You now manage 5–10 services, not one
- Networking, monitoring, and syncing data get tricky
- CI/CD needs to be rock solid
If you’re a small team, microservices might feel like overkill until you really need them.
🐳 Docker’s Role in All This
Docker is a huge enabler across all three approaches.
- Monoliths → 1 image, 1 container
- Modular Monolith → 1 container, multiple logical modules
- Microservices → Multiple containers, each service in its own environment
As I learned more, I discovered tools like:
-
docker-compose: to spin up dev environments with multiple services - Kubernetes : to manage containerized apps in production
For monoliths and modular monoliths, Docker makes deployment simple.
For microservices, Docker makes it possible at all.
🎯 Conclusion: My Advice?
- ✅ Start with a monolith when it’s just you or your MVP.
- 🧩 Modular monolith when you expect growth, it’s the most forgiving and flexible structure.
- 🚀 Microservices when your scale and team size demand it, but only when you’re ready for the operational cost.
Let me know what architecture your project is using and why you chose it.
Would love to hear how others are approaching system design in real-world situations.
-vn-vision
Top comments (0)