Best Architecture for an MVP: Monolithic, Microservices, SOA, or Serverless?

There are a lot of risks implicated in the development of a new product. Developing an application or product is the essential measure for your company, as the whole business idea is set around it. Thus, companies take the MVP approach for releasing their business idea into the market.

There are four major approaches to developing an MVP, monolithic, service-oriented, microservices, and serverless architecture.

This blog will provide you with the correct insights into making the right choice for developing the product.

Table of Contents

• Monolithic Architecture
• Microservices Architecture
• Service-Oriented Architecture
• Serverless Architecture

Monolithic Architecture

What is Monolithic Architecture?

Monolithic architecture is a well-known structure for software applications. This traditional structure is a unified development model, which refers to a single indivisible unit. Since all the software’s parts are unified, different components of the application and its services are combined and managed in a single platform.

Typically, a monolithic application consists of three components:

• Client-side user interface
• Server-side application
• Data interface

Monolithic architecture is easy to develop, test and deploy. Many startups use this approach to create applications as small organizations find it convenient. This architecture helps the software be self-contained due to its interconnected and interdependent components.

Despite being considered outdated by many developers, there are certain circumstances in which you can choose monolithic architecture.

Now, let’s discuss the pros and cons of monolithic architecture.

Pros of Monolithic Architecture

• Suitable for SMBs

If you don’t want to spend a large-scale budget on your business idea or require a simple approach for your MVP, then monolithic architecture is your best option.

• Easy development

In Monolithic Architecture, all the development steps occur within a single directory. As developers can deploy changes or updates separately, it provides them with easy deployment ability saving a lot of time. Also, it allows the integration of several tools promoting the MVP development services.

• Simple Framework

This infrastructure enables easy monitoring due to maintaining front-end, back-end, and database at once for multiple processes.

• Improved Performance

An adequately adopted monolithic architecture approach performs comparatively faster than microservices-based apps. It enables faster communication between software components because of shared code and memory.

• Data Integrity

Monolithic architecture benefits a lot from different mechanisms of data integrity and straightforward transaction controls managed by the RDBMS as they typically use a single database for storage.

Cons of a Monolithic Architect

• Not Suitable for Complex Software

The software keeps on evolving as technology keeps on changing over time. Monolithic being a traditional approach, becomes harder to maintain by the developers.

• Poor Modular Structure

Any changes in the logic of a single module lead to changes in other modules’ codes, making the whole monolithic approach to rebuild for deployment. Also, a failure in a single point can bring down the entire system.

• Agility Issues

In monolithic architecture, a small change request leads to a complete redeployment in the agile working environment. As the team is structured for the development, a task is shared among them, and when an update request arrives, it affects the whole team’s work and significantly reduces the agility.

• No Priority to the Crucial Task

It is a highly coupled architecture, meaning each component is usually treated equally and assigned resources accordingly even if a specific part requires comparatively more resources.

In a Nutshell

The monolithic model works better to develop a simple product that does not require much business logic. Thus, this model is still available in the market and used by some organizations in some cases. If you are at the founding phase of the business and still exploring the product ideas, then this model is suitable for you.

Despite the issues mentioned above that arrive with the monolithic package, this architecture can be beneficial for startups needing to develop a product and get it up for running fastly.

Microservices Architecture

What is Microservices Architecture?

It is a type of Service-Oriented Architecture. A suite of small services combines to construct a complete service in the microservices architecture. It incorporates a large number of microservices that communicate with each other. The microservices architecture consists of multiple independent services created around business capabilities that are combined through APIs.

While the microservices architecture is composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable minor services, it does not reduce the complexity of a system. Instead, it enables the system complexity to be more visible and manageable.

Pros of Microservices Architecture

• Ease of development

One of the significant advantages of microservices is that it comprises small services that are independent of each other, loosely coupled; thus, it can be developed and deployed independently.

• Rectify Agility Issues

Since the architecture is divided into small units, you don’t have to work on the whole app at once and hire several teams to work on different services independently. Consequently, it speeds up the development process and product release.

• Scalability

You can use multiple languages, frameworks, and technologies to develop the microservices architecture. Also, this architecture supports horizontal scaling, which allows developers to scale the different parts of the services dynamically. Therefore, you will be able to launch and develop the app promptly.

Cons of Microservices Architecture

• Development Cost

Since microservices have a higher load of services, deployment, and monitoring, this results in higher operational overhead, resources, and remote calls, which can lead to increased development costs.

• Complexity Issues

Complexity is one of the significant issues with Microservices Architecture. Since it split the product into independent microservices, it became difficult to manage. From design to technical development and implementation, it requires enormous efforts, such as team resources, skills, and planning.

Also, using multiple programming languages for different operations within the development process becomes harder to switch.

• Security Issues

Another issue in Microservices Architecture is not implementing proper security measures. All the services communicating via APIs externally make the product vulnerable to a potential attack.

In a Nutshell

Microservices architecture is excellent for large-scale products and complex systems, with the potential to scale. If you have a high budget set up to spend on MVP development cost and a large development team, you can choose this architecture that will break your complex app into small services.

Service-Oriented Architecture

What is Service-Oriented Architecture?

Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) is a software architecture type that is composed of discrete and loosely coupled software agents employed to perform its function.

SOA has two principal functions that can be played by a software agent:

• Service Provider: It is a software body that executes a service request.
• Service Consumer: It can be another service or an end-user application that calls a service provider.

An SOA concept does not have limitations in the programming language or platform. This design pattern is created to build distributed systems that follow the protocol to deliver services to other applications.

This model uses a message-based communication model to communicate with applications and other services, and its modules are seamlessly integrated and can be easily reused.

Pros of SOA

SOA has the following advantages:

• Easy to Maintain

As the software services are platform-independent in SOA, it is easy to update and manage them without affecting other services.

• Reliability

Services are small compared to the vast code fragments like in the monolithic approach, making the debugging process easy and SOA-based products more reliable.

• Manage Complexity

The implementation is transparent in SOA due to service specification integration, isolating the complexities and making the process more manageable.

• Reusability

It enables service implementation without influencing other applications or services because of its self-contained and loosely coupled nature of functional components. Thus, it facilitates the advantage of reusability of services without impacting other services.

• Parallel Development

Service-oriented architecture follows layer-based and loosely-coupled architecture, due to which it supports parallel development. This enables all the independent services to be developed and completed at the same time.

Cons of SOA

• Greater Load

In a service-oriented architecture, services require full validation of all input parameters during each interaction among them. Therefore, it increases the load when using multiple services, decreasing overall performance and prolonging the response time.

• Complex Service Management

While executing a task in SOA, services have to exchange messages constantly. And, when the number of those messages gets overwhelming, it becomes challenging to manage those services simultaneously.

In a Nutshell

SOA increases the flexibility for building and deploying applications for complex enterprise systems. Microservices offer a more fine-grained approach to accomplishing the same objective, and breaking monolithic applications into smaller components is impossible. Hence, SOA is the best approach to develop complex projects, having unique needs and use cases, into isolated independent services.

SOA can be a quantifiable choice for developing an MVP. You can read our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Development Guide for a better understanding of the process.

Serverless Architecture

What is Serverless Architecture?

A Serverless architecture approach harnesses cloud computing technology to develop and run applications and services. This type of architecture goes beyond Microservices and manages the code execution and deployment without bothering server conditions and infrastructure management.

A third-party cloud service like AWS manages the server maintenance and provision process. The application running on servers eradicates the requirement for additional resources and databases.

Pros of Serverless Architecture

• Easy and Development Deployment

Since the developers do not have to worry about the infrastructure, database, and resource management, developers can focus on code execution and speed up the deployment process.

• Cost-Reduction

You can reduce the development cost in serverless applications as you don’t need to handle databases, extra resources, and manage servers. The only things that cost some charges are the used CPU cycles and memory. Thus, you can develop quality code at minimum expense.

• Scalability

A business that requires an approach where they can scale their product further; serverless is a suitable architecture for them. It allows automatic and seamless scaling through Serverless computing. As the increment of your load, resource request, or user base does not affect your development process; it enables the automatic scale of your application.

Cons of Serverless Architecture

• Tight-Coupling

We cannot build substantial chains of functions as it can complicate the architecture and infrastructure. Also, it makes it difficult to establish the interaction of separate modules, resulting in the same issue as monolithic architecture.

• Migration challenges

As you provide complete control of your operations to a vendor, it becomes challenging to migrate from one vendor to another and limit the business logic changes.

• Not suitable for long-term tasks

A serverless app will need extra FaaS functionality if a task takes more time to process. Thus, it is not suitable for long-term functions.

In a Nutshell

Serverless software architecture can be suitable for fast-growing applications and require rapid change with additional resource support. These days, we can observe many modern applications benefit from the serverless approach for the products that need limitless scaling and are client-heavy apps.

If you are planning to hire an MVP development company, you can consult their Software specialists to follow the best development architecture for your project.

How Can We Help You?

In Sparx IT Solutions, we offer dedicated MVP Development Services, in which we implement different models of minimum viable products. We select a suitable MVP development model and fabricate your digital product as per your budget and requirements. We establish effective communication between the services of your MVP and enable load balancing, scaling up and down of services.

We provide cutting-edge MVP development solutions suitable for your business’s size and product ideas. Contact us to find out your target audience and explore your business idea.

Conclusion

Searching for a suitable MVP architecture is a challenging task. Therefore, comprehensive research is necessary by considering various factors, such as business size, product features, budget, etc. Fabricate an MVP architecture and the hypotheses to validate whether the MVP delivers what your users require. Select the correct MVP development and see your business idea flourishing.