Deconstructing the Monolith: Designing Software that Maximizes Developer Productivity
摘要
Shopify is one of the largest Ruby on Rails codebases in existence. It has been worked on for over a decade by more than a thousand developers. It encapsulates a lot of diverse functionality from billing merchants, managing 3rd party developer apps, updating products, handling shipping and so on. It was initially built as a monolith, meaning that all of these distinct functionalities were built into the same codebase with no boundaries between them. For many years this architecture worked for us, but eventually, we reached a point where the downsides of the monolith were outweighing the benefits. We had a choice to make about how to proceed.
Microservices surged in popularity in recent years and were touted as the end-all solution to all of the problems arising from monoliths. Yet our own collective experience told us that there is no one size fits all best solution, and microservices would bring their own set of challenges. We chose to evolve Shopify into a modular monolith, meaning that we would keep all of the code in one codebase, but ensure that boundaries were defined and respected between different components.
Each software architecture has its own set of pros and cons, and a different solution will make sense for an app depending on what phase of its growth it is in. Going from monolith to modular monolith was the next logical step for us.
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