Evaluating the architectural trade-offs of micro services versus monolithic designs: An empirical analysis of scalability and maintainability in enterprise environments

Abstract

One key problem in enterprise software is the different software architecture problems. The two popular architectures are monolithic and microservices architecture. A review of the literature indicates, however, that current research tends to focus on the assessment of These quality attributes have been studied individually, with limited evidence to support their joint constraints. To overcome this gap, the present study has adopted a systematic secondary data analysis based on a comparative study. Evaluation and Evidence Extraction Synthesis (CEES) framework, a synthesis of empirical findings. From recently published peer-reviewed studies comparing both architectural styles. The analysis combines quantitative Integrate performance evidence and qualitative maintainability properties in one architecture evaluation. Both architectures showed similar performance under baseline workloads but not under overloads; Larger datasets led to increases in response time as the monolithic architecture broke down to a 20 s response time for 10, and then 50, concurrent users. The microservices architecture, on the other hand, maintained a better performance of a 15 s response time. What the results also reveal is that although the microservices promise numerous benefits in the areas of scalability, modularity and fault isolation, these benefits are substantial, but come with the added complexity of managing distributed communication, orchestration, and infrastructure. The study finally demonstrates that the choice of architectural style should be based on the needs of the organization, not technology.