Has Monolithic Architecture Gotten a Bad Rap?

The trend that defined computing architecture during the 2010s was containerization, and it was this trend that lifted The New Stack as a publication to its position as the pre-eminent publisher of open source infrastructure news. Nearly every major vendor in this space, at this time, defined containerization as a kind of exodus away from “monolithic architecture,” where all components of an application or suite were locked together in a cohesive system. The slowdown in containerization’s growth pattern led leaders in the infrastructure space to begin asking, what was so wrong with cohesive system architecture to begin with?

Image of an active termite hill in the middle of an open, green field by Paulgotoo, licensed under Creative Commons 4.0.

Every monolith starts as a microservice, really, if you think about it. As you keep adding on and tacking on, it becomes a monolith. And where the monolith gets a bad reputation is when it’s not revisited, and those abstractions aren’t acted upon.
— Laura Frank, then Director of Engineering, CloudBees [now a private consultant]
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