Monolithic

Notes:

• A company may have more than one monolith
• A monolith means a big heavy app

Pros:

• Knowledge Sharing
• Easier dependency management
• Easier version management
• Easier to track breakages across different projects
• Easier to know what team is doing at a glance

Cons:

• Harder to split code ownership
• Harder to define responsibilities
• Monolithic codebases can easily become a mess
  • No strong conventions
  • Can be harder to deploy
• Increased complexity on codebase
• Harder to distinguish responsibility of the codebase
• A single release cycle where all components are released togther

Examples:

• Facebook
  • Only WWW is a monolithic app

Questions:

• When should you break down a monolithic app?
• When should you unbundle a monolith?

Resources:

• David R. Maclver: Why you should use a single repository for all your company’s projects
  • It is impossible for your code to get out of sync with itself
  • Any change can be considered and reviewed as a single atomic unit
  • Refactoring to modularity becomes cheap