From Monolithic Systems to Microservices: A Comparative Study of Performance

Abstract

Currently, organizations face the need to create scalable applications in an agile way that impacts new forms of production and business organization. The traditional monolithic architecture no longer meets the needs of scalability and rapid development. The efficiency and optimization of human and technological resources prevail; this is why companies must adopt new technologies and business strategies. However, the implementation of microservices still encounters several challenges, such as the consumption of time and computational resources, scalability, orchestration, organization problems, and several further technical complications. Although there are procedures that facilitate the migration from a monolithic architecture to micro-services, none of them accurately quantifies performance differences. The current study aims primarily to analyze some related work that evaluated both architectures. Furthermore, we assess the performance and relationship between different variables of an application that runs in a monolithic structure compared to one of the micro-services. With this, the state-of-the-art review was initially conducted, which confirms the interest of the industry. Subsequently, two different scenarios were evaluated: the first one comprises a web application based on a monolithic architecture that operates on a virtual server with KVM, and the second one demonstrates the same web application based on a microservice architecture, but it runs in containers. Both situations were exposed to stress tests of similar characteristics and with the same hardware resources. For their validation, we applied the non-parametric regression mathematical model to explain the dependency relationship between the performance variables. The results provided a quantitative technical interpretation with precision and reliability, which can be applied to similar issues.

Comparison of Representative Microservices Technologies in Terms of Performance for Use for Projects Based on Sensor Networks

“…Finally, comparative performance studies can be found between monolithic and microservice architecture. Although the title [ 12 ] announces that it is a comparative study, it nevertheless focuses on examining general problems and benefits, and challenges in the transition from a monolithic to a microservice model. Although this is a very important voice in the discussion and contains important experimental data, they are, again, not related to the problem that can be encountered with the high requirements of applications that analyze ad hoc data from sensor networks, such as in medical applications, when the speed of data processing depends on the patient’s reaction or a decision about some action, while taking care to use the lowest possible consumption of energy and therefore also physical resources, including sensors in the network or communication beacons.…”

Peer Review #1 of "BMDD: a novel approach for IoT platform (broker-less and microservice architecture, decentralized identity, and dynamic transmission messages) (v0.1)"

“…Microservice is an approach to develop an application using a set of small services, each of which runs its process independently, usually an HTTP resource API. This modern architecture allows more extensive, more complex, and scalable applications (79).…”

BMDD: a novel approach for IoT platform (broker-less and microservice architecture, decentralized identity, and dynamic transmission messages)

“…Microservice is an approach to develop an application using a set of small services, each of which runs its process independently, usually an HTTP resource API. This modern architecture allows more extensive, more complex, and scalable applications ( Tapia et al, 2020 ).…”