Monolithic application
lastmod 2025-09-02created 2025-09-022 edits
See also
Favorite site
Articles
- Use one big server (2022) | GeekNews
- [Original] Use One Big Server | Speculative Branches
- The heart of the debate is not monolith vs. microservices, but judging whether distributed systems are worth their development/operations overhead
- A modern single server has tens to hundreds of cores, TB-scale memory, and tens to hundreds of Gbps of I/O, leaving ample performance headroom for most web services
- Real benchmarks show a single server can deliver high performance such as Nginx at 500K RPS, PostgreSQL at 70K IOPS, NoSQL at 1M IOPS, and 4K encoding at 75 FPS
- The cloud offers convenience and high availability, but its cost premium is substantial, so return on investment must be weighed
- Cloud-native and serverless architectures only pay off cost-wise when usage patterns are extremely variable
- However, serverless/micro-VM setups carry a large cost premium, and if workloads are steady/predictable, vertical scaling is more economical
- Availability can largely be handled with primary/secondary (or 2×2) redundancy and mixed hardware, and buying only CDN and backups as distributed services is a sensible strategy