Monolithic Architecture Details

Basic Introduction

With the rapid development of internet technology and the proliferation of mobile devices, global internet users have grown from 360 million in 2000 to 5.3 billion in 2023. At the same time, website traffic has shown exponential growth. In this context, traditional monolithic architectures have exposed many limitations when facing high-concurrency requests and rapid business iteration needs: poor scalability, low development efficiency, long deployment cycles, and other issues are becoming increasingly prominent.

Monolithic Architecture Explained

Monolithic Architecture is a traditional software architecture pattern whose core characteristic is integrating all functional modules of an application (including user interface, business logic, data access, etc.) into a single codebase, ultimately packaged as a single deployable unit.

Common Application Scenarios

  • Small applications for startup companies
  • Internal management systems (such as OA, CRM, etc.)
  • Display-type websites with daily PV < 100,000
  • Short-term projects with short development cycles

Advantages

  • Fast development for small projects, low cost: Suitable for startup teams or MVP product development
  • Simple architecture: Using monolithic application architecture, all functional modules are in the same codebase
  • Easy to test: Fast execution of unit tests and integration tests
  • Easy to deploy: Only need to deploy a single application package

Disadvantages

  • Severe module coupling in large projects, difficult to develop and maintain, high communication costs
  • Difficult to add new business: Existing architecture is difficult to accommodate new business requirements
  • Core business and edge business mixed together, problems in one affect the other

Vertical Architecture Details

Basic Concepts

Vertical Architecture (Vertical Architecture) is a system architecture method that vertically divides a monolithic application according to business domains or functional modules. In this architecture, the original monolithic application is split into multiple independent, vertical business subsystems, with each subsystem responsible for specific business functions.

Core Characteristics

  1. Vertical business division: Divide the system according to business lines or functional modules
  2. Independent deployment and operation: Each vertical subsystem can be independently developed, tested, deployed, and run

Implementation Advantages

  1. Business isolation: Avoid mutual influence between systems
  2. Improved R&D efficiency: Teams can divide work by vertical domain, reducing code conflicts
  3. Technology selection flexibility: Different businesses can adopt the most suitable technical solutions

Advantages

  • System splitting achieves traffic sharing, solving concurrency problems
  • Can optimize different systems
  • Convenient for horizontal expansion, load balancing, improved fault tolerance
  • Systems are independent of each other, no mutual influence, more efficient for new business iterations

Disadvantages

  • Hard-coded interface calls between service systems
  • After building clusters, implementing load balancing is more complex
  • Insufficient monitoring of service system interface calls, inconsistent calling methods
  • Insufficient service monitoring
  • Database resource waste, filled with slow queries

Distributed Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Overview

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a software design method that provides application functionality as services for use by other components. Based on traditional vertical architecture, SOA further splits each project into multiple loosely coupled service units.

Core Characteristics of SOA

  1. Service independence: Each service usually runs as an independent process
  2. Network communication: Interaction between services through standardized network protocols
  3. Loose coupling: Services are connected through standard interfaces
  4. Reusability: Services can be reused across multiple business scenarios

Introducing Dubbo Framework

Dubbo, as a high-performance RPC framework, provides a complete enterprise-level SOA solution:

  1. Remote method invocation: Transparent RPC based on interfaces
  2. Service governance capabilities: Intelligent fault tolerance, load balancing
  3. Service registration and discovery: Automatic service registration and dynamic discovery
  4. Extensibility: Supports service degradation, grayscale release

Detailed Advantages

  1. Service interface-oriented and transparent remote invocation
  2. Business layering and modular design
  3. Data security and permission control
  4. Stateless design
  5. Service owner mechanism

In-depth Disadvantages Analysis

  1. Risk of service granularity out of control
  2. Interface explosion problem
  3. Version compatibility challenges
  4. Distributed chain hidden dangers

Microservices Architecture

Microservices architecture is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and using lightweight mechanisms like HTTP for interaction, with independent deployment mechanisms. These services are managed centrally with very little，集中化管理 They can use different programming languages and different storage technologies.

Microservices are an evolution of SOA with finer granularity. The key emphasis of microservices architecture is: “Business needs complete componentization and servicization.”