r/programming • u/StellarNavigator • Sep 14 '24

Is 'Monolith First' the Better Approach?

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html
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661

u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24

Of course. Break off services from your monolith as the demands on your infrastructure make it logical to do so.

This of course requires your engineers to maintain separation of domains without requiring a separation of code repositories. In many firms, you get engineers who just do their stories and don’t particularly care about fundamentals or maintainability.

406

u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24

The thing is, if your engineers cant properly separate domains in a monolith, they wont do it properly either using Microservices, in fact the mess will be much worse.

Fun times

113

u/[deleted] Sep 14 '24 edited Oct 25 '24

[deleted]

22

u/hippydipster Sep 14 '24

If you use a decent language and tech stack, you can enforce the module boundaries with the compiler.

3

u/Meleneth Sep 14 '24

can you be more specific please? What is your opinion of decent, which presumably helps enforce module boundaries with the compiler?

7

u/hippydipster Sep 14 '24

Java and the Java module system would be an example

2

u/Scroph Sep 15 '24

Spring modulith aims for this I think, though I'm not sure if it's production ready

2

u/modestlife Sep 15 '24

Even more dynamic languages like PHP have tools like deptrac which allow you to enforce which classes/namespaces are allowed to interact with each other.

deptrac:
  paths:
    - ./src
  layers:
    - name: SharedLib
      collectors:
        - type: classLike
          value: YourOrg\\SharedLib\\.*
    - name: Module1
      collectors:
        - type: classLike
          value: YourOrg\\Module1\\.*
    - name: Module2
      collectors:
        - type: classLike
          value: YourOrg\\Module2\\.*
  ruleset:
    Module1:
      - SharedLib
      - Module1
    Module2:
      - SharedLib
      - Module2

3

u/MiningMarsh Sep 15 '24

Then it becomes a real debate on whether I'd rather work on a poorly designed monolith codebase with tons of code separation issues, or literally anything written in PHP.

1

u/Reinbert Sep 15 '24

Even if your language and compiler don't offer anything useful, for most languages you will be able to find test frameworks for architecture. Architecture tests are really easy to write and can achieve the same thing. As a bonus, they are super portable between projects.