Differences in performance, scalability, and cost of using microservice and monolithic architecture

Abstract

A microservices-based architecture is a set of small components that communicate with each other using a programming language-independent API [1]. It has been gaining popularity for more than a decade. One of its advantages is greater agility in software development and following modern, agile software development practices [2]. The article presents an experimental study. Two applications with the same business logic and different architecture were developed. Both applications were tested using prepared test cases on the local computer of one of the authors and the Microsoft Azure platform. The results were collected and compared using the JMeter tool. In almost all cases, the monolithic architecture proved to be more efficient. The comparable performance of both architectures occurred when queries were handled by the business logic layer for a relatively long time.