From Monolith to Microservices: A Practical Journey Through Modern Architecture
This article chronicles the evolution of software architecture from monolithic applications to microservices, detailing each stage's advantages and drawbacks, and enumerates the essential technology stack—including service communication, API gateways, authentication, fault handling, tracing, logging, configuration, containers, orchestration, and CI/CD—that enables building scalable, resilient backend systems.
Architecture Evolution
Software design has grown in scale and complexity, driving higher demands for performance, throughput, stability and scalability. This led to new architectural concepts such as distributed systems, SOA, microservices and middle‑platform.
Monolithic Architecture
Definition: A single process runs the whole application, regardless of internal layers.
Advantages: Simple development, no network overhead.
Disadvantages: Hard to maintain, tightly coupled, difficult to scale for high‑concurrency or big‑data scenarios.
Vertical Split
Large systems are divided by business domain (e.g., flash‑sale, fresh‑goods, supermarket). Each domain runs in its own process, reducing coupling.
Advantages: Independent deployment, easier maintenance.
Disadvantages: Increased storage complexity, duplicated code.
Distributed Services
Further decomposition creates multiple independent services that communicate across processes. While it improves reuse, it introduces code duplication and higher operational cost.
Advantages: Independent processes, high cohesion, low coupling, easier evolution.
Disadvantages: Data consistency, increased latency, higher debugging complexity.
Microservice Architecture
Microservices are a refined form of distributed services that break business logic into small, independently deployable units. They inherit the benefits of distribution while adding fine‑grained scalability and availability.
Key characteristics: availability (continuous service provision) and scalability (dynamic resource addition), usually achieved with clustering and load balancing.
Related Technologies
Service communication: WebAPI, WCF, gRPC.
API gateway: Ocelot – an open‑source .NET Core gateway. https://ocelot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html Authentication & Authorization: IdentityServer4 (OpenID Connect & OAuth2). https://github.com/IdentityServer/IdentityServer4 Transient fault handling: Polly library. https://github.com/App-vNext/Polly Distributed tracing: SkyAPM. https://github.com/SkyAPM/SkyAPM-dotnet Logging: Exceptionless, ELK/Elastic Stack.
https://exceptionless.com/https://github.com/exceptionless/ExceptionlessConfiguration center: Apollo. https://github.com/ctripcorp/apollo/ Distributed lock: Consul, Redis, Zookeeper, database.
Distributed transaction patterns: 2PC, 3PC, TCC, saga, local‑message table (often with RabbitMQ).
Containerization: Docker. https://www.docker.com/ Orchestration: Kubernetes. https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/ CI/CD: Jenkins.
https://www.jenkins.org.cn/Conclusion
The author records the learning path and technology stack for microservices, inviting further deep‑dive into each component.
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