Monolithisation

Monolithisation is a term used in software development to describe the process of breaking down a monolithic application into smaller, independent services. This approach is often taken to improve scalability, maintainability, and agility. In a monolithic architecture, all components of an application are tightly coupled and deployed as a single unit. This can lead to challenges when the application grows in size and complexity, making it difficult to update or scale specific parts without affecting the entire system.

The transition to monolithisation, also known as refactoring or decomposition, involves identifying distinct functionalities within the monolith and extracting them into separate microservices. Each microservice typically focuses on a specific business capability and communicates with other services through well-defined APIs. This distributed architecture allows teams to develop, deploy, and scale individual services independently, reducing development lead times and enabling faster innovation.

While monolithisation offers numerous benefits, it also introduces complexities. Managing a distributed system requires careful consideration of inter-service communication, data consistency, distributed tracing, and overall system orchestration. The shift often involves adopting new technologies and development practices, such as containerization and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, to effectively manage the increased number of services. The decision to pursue monolithisation is typically driven by business needs and the desire to overcome the limitations of a large, single-codebase application.