Performance characteristics between monolithic and microservice-based systems

Abstract: A new promising technology to face the problem of scalability and availability is the microservice architecture. The problem with this architecture is that there is no significant study that clearly proves the performance differences compared to the monolithic architecture. Our thesis aims to provide a more conclusive answer of how the microservice architecture differs performance wise compared to the monolithic architecture. In this study, we conducted several experiments on a self-developed microservice and monolithic system. We used JMeter to simulate users and after running the tests we looked at the latency, successful throughput for the tests and measured the RAM and CPU usage with Datadog. Results that were found, were that the microservice architecture can be more beneficial than the monolithic architecture. Docker was also proven to not have any negative impact on performance and computer cluster can improve performance.  We have presented a conclusive answer that microservices can be better in some cases than a monolithic architecture.