Monolithic apps rule !

Well, that's a bold one and obviously needs some criticism. Yet, that being said, monolithic apps rule. (And this is recursion)

Because they are easy to "visualize" and as a programmer you need to be able to visualize to be able to create. 

Because they are easy to deploy. I guess the term "monolithic" speaks for itself here.

Because they are easy to debug. Everything you need is packed together after all.

Because I'm sure we can keep adding items to this list.

And it will work great as long as your client base does not grow, or the system is designed to be consumed by one tenant only or if not, all your tenants share the same business flow or .... well you got the idea.

At some point, if you happen to hit one of those barriers then there's a good chance all hell will break loose. You may encounter anything from spending a lot of money on hardware to rewriting (not refactor) parts and pieces (or maybe all of it) of your app from scratch.

This is a common problem many start-ups face, you start with something small that's not very well coded (some call it MVP). And it looks OK with 100 clients making 3 requests everyday. But once you get the investment (even if it is yourself putting the cash in) those numbers ideally, will need to be multiplied by hundreds if not thousands.

That's why if you can come up with a monolithic application idea that doesn't necessarily change from one customer to another, that can be deployed without a headache, that can scale by the client installation, you got a winner.

Well yeah, notepad.exe is still my favorite application.Single threaded, doesn't need too much processing power, can have tens of them running in parallel and can edit any type of text I need.

However, this is not how it works in the real world is it? In real world, most of the time, we deal with services and the rest becomes just another presentation layer. (Unless you are working on the next operating system)

And in the real world there is this incredible thing called the "Internet" and we don't actually know how many clients we are going to have, how many bad guys will try to break the system.

That's a very good reason to rethink our strategy. In a world of a lot of unknowns and parameters that we cannot control we need to ensure our system can be modified, updated, deployed and configured seamlessly.

To be able to achieve that (or a bit of that) we need to step outside of our safe zone and get into the wilderness.

Next time: Do monolithic apps rule?