Views: 808 Microservices vs. modular monolith: behind these two architectures lies the same ambition — making your information system more reliable, scalable and profitable. Technology leaders still have to determine which model best reflects their business challenges, organisation and budget. Microservices consist of a set of independent services, whereas a modular monolith packs all features into a single, carefully compartmentalised deployment. Choosing well therefore means balancing autonomy, complexity, time‑to‑market and governance. Below are the key points for an informed decision.
Microservices: agility and frictionless scalability
Decouple to accelerate, but never neglect governance.
Popular with cloud giants, the microservices architecture breaks the application into autonomous services, each responsible for a specific business domain. Exposed via lightweight APIs, orchestrated by a mesh of containers, and routed through API gateways, these services can be deployed independently. Your team can release a new feature without freezing the entire product, test business hypotheses rapidly and tune capacity precisely to demand. Decoupling boosts velocity, lowers the risk of global regression and underpins a ROI‑driven “fail fast” strategy.
Beyond speed, microservices leverage a vast open‑source ecosystem — Kubernetes for orchestration, gRPC for high‑performance communication, and Keycloak or Ory for identity federation. This freedom reduces vendor lock‑in and optimises infrastructure costs by maximising the pay‑per‑use model of cloud providers. Another benefit is resilience: an incident affecting a payment service no longer brings the whole e‑commerce platform down. That said, multiplying services erodes visibility unless observability practices (tracing, correlated logging, metrics) are rigorously woven in from the very first sprint.
Operational complexity is the flip side. Version management, Zero‑Trust policies between services, FinOps budgets, recruiting SRE profiles — each dimension becomes a project in its own right. This is why Edana favours a gradual approach: first stabilise a reproducible DevSecOps foundation, then extract the most volatile microservices step by step, often written in Go or Node.js for execution speed. You keep control of dependencies while capitalising on bespoke development. The result: a modular IS able to handle traffic peaks without sacrificing gross margin or energy performance.
Modular Monolith: operational coherence and cost control
Centralise intelligently to ship faster and simplify maintenance.
The modular monolith follows the opposite logic: gather the application in a single executable, but organise it into explicitly decoupled modules within the same codebase. It is sometimes called a “guided monolith” because each module exposes clear interfaces and forbids circular dependencies. In production, a single artefact is deployed, reducing the error surface and simplifying monitoring. For a financial or industrial service that values stability, this approach limits network‑related mishaps while remaining fully compatible with CI/CD pipelines and containers.
Budget‑wise, a single deployment simplifies cloud billing: one shared database, less inter‑service traffic and shorter build times. Teams stay focused on business needs rather than plumbing. Open‑source frameworks like Spring Boot or .NET 8 now enable strict modularisation (hexagonal architecture, Gradle modules, plug‑ins) while delivering near‑C++ performance. The paradigm is far from obsolete: it even adapts to serverless architectures thanks to faster cold starts than a constellation of scattered microservices.
However, codebase size can become prohibitive if the organisation scales too quickly. Test cycles grow heavier, technical debt may accumulate unchecked, and a major outage can immobilise the entire system. Our team therefore recommends moving toward internal domain‑driven decomposition or planning a gradual shift to microservices as the company strengthens its DevOps governance. Through architecture audits, we pinpoint “hotspots” to extract first, while ensuring critical business logic remains under a single pipeline’s control to guarantee service quality.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support mid-sized and large enterprises in their digital transformation
Business and technical criteria for choosing
Your architecture must serve your business goals first – never the other way around.
Before choosing, list the outcomes you expect: reduced time‑to‑market, regulatory compliance, international performance or a controlled carbon footprint. An elastic microservice can absorb peaks during a global marketing campaign, whereas a modular monolith often fits better with a stable roadmap where functional coherence is paramount. Clarifying these priorities helps weigh orchestration costs, high‑availability needs and risk tolerance.
Organisational maturity is another filter. Microservices assume autonomous teams, an advanced DevSecOps culture and industrial‑grade CI/CD processes. Without these prerequisites, theoretical benefits evaporate quickly. Conversely, a modular monolith can be managed efficiently by a central team of up to twenty developers, provided code reviews and layering are rigorous. Security also plays a role: if you handle sensitive data (healthcare, finance), microservice segmentation isolates risks but expands the network attack surface.
Finally, the budget trajectory must remain visible. Microservices imply rising OPEX — per‑call billing, distributed monitoring, service‑mesh licences — whereas the modular monolith concentrates costs into CAPEX spikes (major upgrades, non‑regression tests). At Edana, we build three‑year comparative scenarios covering not only hosting but also HR costs, training and carbon footprint. This global view provides a tangible ROI aligned with CSR priorities and external‑growth ambitions.
Edana’s view: hybrid ecosystems and long‑term support
Leverage the existing, add bespoke elements and stay free for tomorrow.
Because no single solution is universal, Edana often designs hybrid architectures: a modular‑monolith backbone for core logic, surrounded by “satellite” microservices for high‑variability functions (data analytics, AI, payments). This strategy relies on open source — for example PostgreSQL, Keycloak, Node.js, Istio and Quarkus — to cut licence costs, avoid proprietary lock‑in and stimulate internal innovation. Our architects favour evolutionary designs (event‑driven, CQRS, API contract‑first) and living documentation to guarantee maintainability.
Consider the case of a Swiss healthcare group with about a hundred employees we assisted. Their legacy PHP monolith slowed product teams and caused 2 % monthly downtime. Our team progressively migrated the most volatile modules — patient scheduling and connected‑device catalogue — to containerised Node.js microservices, while refactoring the remaining code into a modular Laravel core. The outcome: continuous deployment every two weeks, a 35 % drop in critical incidents and stable infrastructure costs thanks to auto‑scaling.
Beyond technology, our support translates into co‑design workshops, transparent governance and jointly defined success metrics. This proximity avoids the tunnel effect typical of off‑shore approaches and strengthens internal ownership. It also embraces CSR: optimised CPU cycles, responsibly powered data centres with a low‑carbon footprint and documentation accessible to all. You gain a living software architecture aligned with your growth objectives and societal commitments.
Decide with confidence and plan for the future
Behind the “microservices vs. modular monolith” debate, the real issue is your ability to create value faster than your competitors while safeguarding margins and reputation. The right model is the one that matches your objectives, talent and financial horizon instead of constraining them. A clear‑eyed analysis of your DevSecOps maturity, regulatory constraints and scale‑up ambitions naturally guides the decision. Whether reinforcing an existing monolith or planning a shift to a constellation of microservices, the essential point is to secure each step so it remains reversible, measurable and aligned with your organisation’s broader strategy.
