Challenges When Moving from Monolith to Microservice Architecture

Abstract

One of the more recent avenues towards more flexible installations and execution is the transition from monolithic architecture to microservice architecture. In such architecture, where microservices can be more liberally updated, relocated, and replaced, building liquid software also becomes simpler, as adaptation and deployment of code is easier than when using a monolithic architecture where almost everything is connected. In this paper, we study this type of transition. The objective is to identify the reasons why the companies decide to make such transition, and identify the challenges that companies may face during this transition. Our method is a survey based on different publications and case studies conducted about these architectural transitions from monolithic architecture to microservices. Our findings reveal that typical reasons moving towards microservice architecture are complexity, scalability and code ownership. The challenges, on the other hand, can be separated to architectural challenges and organizational challenges. The conclusion is that when a software company grows big enough in size and starts facing problems regarding the size of the codebase, that is when microservices can be a good way to handle the complexity and size. Even though the transition provides its own challenges, these challenges can be easier to solve than the challenges that monolithic architecture presents to company.