A Comparative Review of Microservices and Monolithic Architectures

TL;DR

This paper compares microservices and monolithic architectures, analyzing their performance in various scenarios and configurations, revealing that monolithic can outperform microservices in throughput, with service discovery technology also impacting results.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of microservices and monolithic architectures, including specific configurations and service discovery technologies, clarifying performance differences.

Findings

Monolithic architecture showed 6% higher throughput in concurrency testing.

No significant throughput difference in load testing scenarios.

Consul-based microservices outperformed Eureka in throughput.

Abstract

Microservices' architecture is getting attention in the academic community and the industry, and mostly is compared with monolithic architecture. Plenty of the results of these research papers contradict each other regarding the performance of these architectures. Therefore, these two architectures are compared in this paper, and some specific configurations of microservices' applications are evaluated as well in the term of service discovery. Monolithic architecture in concurrency testing showed better performance in throughput by 6% when compared to microservices architecture. The load testing scenario did not present significant difference between the two architectures. Furthermore, a third test comparing microservices applications built with different service discovery technologies such as Consul and Eureka showed that applications with Consul presented better results in terms of throughput.