A case study of performance comparison between monolithic and microservice-based quality control system

Abstract: Microservice architecture has emerged as a new way to create large complex applications by removing some problems that exist for a monolithic counterpart. While this will asset agility, resilience, maintainability and scalability within the application, other problems will be predominant such as performance. This case study aims to provide more clarity on this matter by comparing a microservice architecture with a monolithic architecture. By conducting several experiment on two self-developed systems it could be found that microservice architecture will must likely show a lower performance in terms of throughput and latency on HTTP requests which use internal communication requests. On small intensive HTTP requests with minimum internal communication the difference between the architectures is so low it could almost be neglected. With microservice architecture comes other challenges that a company must keep into account such loadbalancing, caching and orchestration which are beneficial for the performance.