Architectural Crossroads: Navigating Monolithic, Microservices, Serverless, and Event-Driven Systems
R. Kumar · Journal of Software Engineering and Simulation · 2021
As organizations embrace digital transformation, choosing the right system architecture remains a critical decision that impacts scalability, maintainability, and operational costs. The traditional monolithic approach, while stable and easy to deploy, faces challenges in agility and scalability. Microservices architectures offer modularity and independent scaling but introduce complexities in inter-service communication and operational overhead. Serverless computing abstracts infrastructure management and enables auto-scaling but has constraints in execution time, vendor lock-in, and cold start issues. Event-driven architectures facilitate asynchronous processing, improving responsiveness and decoupling system components, but introduce challenges in consistency and debugging. This paper presents a comparative analysis of these architectures, examining performance, cost implications, security considerations, and best-fit use cases. By analyzing real-world industry adoption trends, this study provides decision-making guidelines for organizations to select the appropriate architecture based on their business and technical needs.