# Monolithic Architecture

> Everything in one deployable unit — simple to build, hard to scale as you grow.

- **Category**: Microservices
- **Subcategory**: Architecture Style
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/monolithic_architecture/

---

## Description
Clean, reusable architecture pattern.


## Use Cases
Early-stage startup with 5 engineers ships a Rails monolith. Everyone deploys together, one DB, fast iteration. At 50 engineers and 10M users, they start extracting services via Strangler Fig.





## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Simple to develop, test, and deploy early on

- No distributed systems complexity — everything is a function call

- ACID transactions across the whole system trivially

- Easy to run locally — one process, one DB

- Low operational overhead




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Scaling requires scaling the entire application (can't scale one feature)

- Large team coordination bottleneck — everyone touches the same codebase

- Long CI/CD pipelines — full app must be built and tested for every change

- Technology lock-in — hard to adopt new tech for specific parts

- map[Reliability:one bad deploy can take down everything]







---
**Reference**: [Original Source](https://microservices.io/patterns/monolithic.html)