Keysight Connect #8 - Building a Cloud-Ready Product
Let’s start with the definition of a monolithic application. A monolith is a software app in which both the user interface and source code are combined into a single program from a single platform.
Monoliths can function independently from other applications, the idea behind the software being that they should be able to complete an entire function and not just particular tasks that make up that function. In other words, they get the whole job done.
For a while, monolithic applications were the norm in the software engineering world, and there are still niches and use cases today where monoliths make sense. However, as technology evolved, so did the apps we use every day - they became too large and too hard to manage to remain monoliths. And that’s how the concept of distributed applications was born.
The Transition to Distributed Applications
As opposed to monoliths, distributed applications are apps comprised of many different, smaller apps. Each of these smaller apps is responsible for one task and one task only and are also known as microservices.
One of the main benefits of microservices architecture is that individual components can be reused in other applications - you don’t have to build it from scratch again and again. One such example is the login feature. If you were to create monolithic apps, you’d have to make a login feature for each individual app. In a microservices architecture, though, you only have to create it once and reuse it as many times as you want for any new application that you build.
There are other benefits to using microservices architectures as opposed to monolithic ones, such as:
- reducing programmatic development risks
- providing a single, unified view of the data
- improving the control and synchronization of systems.
Although the benefits are substantial, many businesses still delay the transition to a microservices architecture simply because this transition is difficult. And they are right. However, it’s not impossible.
At our latest Keysight Connect meet-up, we talked about how we transformed a monolith into a distributed application using microservices, distributed storage, and Kubernetes. Want to find out? Watch our latest Keysight Connect meet-up video below 👇
*This video was recorded during a Keysight Technologies Romania online meetup. If you want to be notified about upcoming events, follow us on social media.