Reasons You Should Build a Monolith

You’re building a new software project! Congratulations! You’ll make millions and people will love you. It’s going to be awesome.

Your first question (of course) is: Should you build a monolith or use Microservices?  Great Question!

You should build a monolith if you:

• Have only a hammer and can see everything as a nail.
• Have the language you’re going to use, right or wrong.
• Know no one on the team can possibly learn a new language. That’s insane.
• Enjoy contorting your language/framework to solve problems it was never meant to.
• Enjoy building a new  library or framework because of the above.
• Believe wholeheartedly in the idea of one code repository.
• Can’t imagine how people would ever deploy multiple code bases.
• Enjoy the simplicity of one, getting progressively longer, build?
• Code merges are so much fun.
• Enjoy spelunking through your code to find out where you’re supposed to make that bug fix.
• Enjoy writing the reams of documentation that will show people how to navigate the project.
• Believe what’s good enough for Ruby on Rails, Django, and ASP.NET is good enough for your team.
• Can’t imagine why anyone would want to write tests against an HTTP API.
• Scoff when someone mentions a new language.
• Are pretty sure the business requirements aren’t going to change
• Have been bitten way too many times by new languages and frameworks that just don’t work out
• Think the idea of containers is nuts. A computer inside of a computer inside of a computer? Craziness.
• Think the network is obviously the slowest part; Keep all the calls in process.
• Love complicated branching strategies; maybe even owning a gitflow T-shirt.
• Love process! Process is your friend. Code freeze, QA, UAT, deployment, Change requests. no one’s getting code in without being reviewed!
• Believe in Scaling up.  Scaling out is just expensive, and the network is slow!
• Believe people that allow data to be duplicated throughout the system are reckless. One authoritative place for data!
• Simple implementations are the best; no need for microservices; they’re complex.

Enjoy your newly minted monolith! It’s going to be fast. It’s going to be simple to modify. It’s going to be awesome.