Why Legacy Monolithic Architectures Won’t Work For Digital Platforms..

As times change, so do architectural paradigms in software development. For the more than fifteen years the industry has been developing large scale JEE/.NET applications, the three-tier architecture has been the dominant design pattern. However, as enterprises embark or continue on their Digital Journey, they are facing a new set of business challenges which demand fresh technology approaches. We have looked into transformative data architectures at a great degree of depth in this blog, now let us now consider a rethink in the Applications themselves. Applications that were earlier deemed to be sufficiently well-architected are now termed as being monolithic.  This post solely focuses on the underpinnings of why legacy architectures will not work in the new software-defined world. My intention is not to merely criticize a model (the three-tier monolith) that has worked well in the past but merely to reason why it may be time for a generally well accepted newer paradigm.

Traditional Software Platform Architectures… 

Digital applications support a wider variety of frontends & channels, they need to accommodate larger volumes of users, they need wider support for a range of business actors  – partners, suppliers et al via APIs. Finally, these new age applications need to work with unstructured data formats (as opposed to the strictly structured relational format). From an operations standpoint, there is a strong need for a higher degree of automation in the datacenter. All of these requirements call for agility as the most important construct in the enterprise architecture.

As we will discuss, legacy applications (typically defined as created more than 5+ years ago) are beginning to emerge as one of the key obstacles in doing Digital. The issue is not just in the underlying architectures themselves but also in the development culture involved building and maintaining such applications.

Consider the vast majority of applications deployed in enterprise data centers. These applications deliver collections of very specific business functions – e.g. onboarding new customers, provisioning services, processing payments etc. Whatever be the choice of vendor application platform, the vast majority of existing enterprise applications & platforms essentially follows a traditional three-tier software architecture with specific separation of concerns at each tier (as the vastly simplified illustration depicts below).

Traditional three-tier Monolithic Application Architecture

The first tier is the Presentation tier which is depicted at the top of the diagram. The job of the presentation tier is to present the user experience. This includes the user interface components that present various clients with the overall web application flow and also renders UI components. A variety of UI frameworks that provide both flow and UI rendering is typically used here. These include Spring MVC, Apache Struts, HTML5, AngularJS et al.

The middle tier is the Business logic tier where all the business logic for the application is centralized while separating it from the user interface layer. The business logic is usually a mix of objects and business rules written in Java using frameworks such EJB3, Spring etc. The business logic is housed in an application server such as JBoss AS or Oracle WebLogic AS or IBM WebSphere AS – which provides enterprise services (such as caching, resource pooling, naming and identity services et al) to the business components run on these servers. This layer also contains data access logic and also initiates transactions to a range of supporting systems – message queues, transaction monitors, rules and workflow engines, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) based integration, accessing partner systems using web services, identity, and access management systems et al.

The Data tier is where traditional databases and enterprise integration systems logically reside. The RDBMS rules this area in three-tier architectures & the data access code is typically written using an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework such as Hibernate or iBatis or plain JDBC code.

Across all of these layers, common utilities & agents are provided to address cross-cutting concerns such as logging, monitoring, security, single sign-on etc.

The application is packaged as an enterprise archive (EAR) which can be composed of a single or multiple WAR/JAR files. While most enterprise-grade applications are neatly packaged, the total package is typically compiled as a single collection of various modules and then shipped as one single artifact. It should bear mentioning that dependency & version management can be a painstaking exercise for complex applications.

Let us consider the typical deployment process and setup for a thee tier application.

From a deployment standpoint, static content is typically served from an Apache webserver which fronts a Java-based webserver (mostly Tomcat) and then a cluster of backend Java-based application servers running multiple instances of the application for High Availability. The application is Stateful (and Stateless in some cases) in most implementations. The rest of the setup with firewalls and other supporting systems is fairly standard.

While the above architectural template is fairly standard across industry applications built on Java EE, there are some very valid reasons why it has begun to emerge as an anti-pattern when applied to digital applications.

Challenges involved in developing and maintaining Monolithic Applications …

Let us consider what Digital business usecases demand of application architecture and where the monolith is inadequate at satisfying.

1. The entire application is typically packaged as a single enterprise archive (EAR file), which is a combination of various WAR and JAR files. While this certainly makes the deployment easier given that there is only one executable to copy over, it makes the development lifecycle a nightmare. The reason being that even a simple change in the user interface can cause a rebuild of the entire executable. This results in not just long cycles but makes it extremely hard on teams that span various disciplines from the business to QA.
2. What follows from such long “code-test & deploy” cycles are that the architecture becomes change resistant, the code very complex over time and as a whole the system subsequently becomes not agile at all in responding to rapidly changing business requirements.
3. Developers are constrained in multiple ways. Firstly the architecture becomes very complex over a period of time which inhibits quick new developer onboarding. Secondly,  the architecture force-fits developers from different teams into working in lockstep thus forgoing their autonomy in terms of their planning and release cycles. Services across tiers are not independently deployable which leads to big bang releases in short windows of time. Thus it is no surprise that failures and rollbacks happen at an alarming rate.
4. From an infrastructure standpoint, the application is tightly coupled to the underlying hardware. From a software clustering standpoint, the application scales better vertically while also supporting limited horizontal scale-out. As volumes of customer traffic increase, performance across clusters can degrade.
5. The Applications are neither designed nor tested to operate gracefully under failure conditions. This is a key point which does not really get that much attention during design time but causes performance headaches later on.
6. An important point is that Digital applications & their parts are beginning to be created using different languages such as Java, Scala, and Groovy etc. The Monolith essentially limits such a choice of languages, frameworks, platforms and even databases.
7. The Architecture does not natively support the notion of API externalization or Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD).
8. As highlighted above, the architecture primarily supports the relational model. If you need to accommodate alternative data approaches such as NoSQL or Hadoop, you are largely out of luck.

Operational challenges involved in running a Monolithic Application…

The difficulties in running a range of monolithic applications across an operational infrastructure have already been summed up in the other posts on this blog.

The primary issues include –

1. The Monolithic architecture typically dictates a vertical scaling model which ensures limits on its scalability as users increase. The typical traditional approach to ameliorate this has been to invest in multiple sets of hardware (servers, storage arrays) to physically separate applications which results in increases in running cost, a higher personnel requirement and manual processes around system patch and maintenance etc.
2. Capacity management tends to be a bit of challenge as there are many fine-grained resources competing for compute, network and storage resources (vCPU, vRAM, virtual Network etc) that are essentially running on a single JVM. Lots of JVM tuning is needed from a test and pre-production standpoint.
3. A range of functions needed to be performed around monolithic Applications lack any kind of policy-driven workload and scheduling capability. This is because the Application does very little to drive the infrastructure.
4. The vast majority of the work needed to be done to provision, schedule and patch these applications is done by system administrators and consequently, automation is minimal at best.
5. The same is true in Operations Management. Functions like log administration, other housekeeping, monitoring, auditing, app deployment, and rollback are vastly manual with some scripting.

Conclusion…

It deserves mention that the above Monolithic design pattern will work well for Departmental (low user volume) applications which have limited business impact and for applications serving a well-defined user base with well delineated workstreams. The next blog post will consider the microservices way of building new age architectures. We will introduce and discuss Cloud Native Application development which has been popularized across web-scale enterprises esp Netflix. We will also discuss how this new paradigm overcomes many of the above-discussed limitations from both a development and operations standpoint.