Alignment with agile practices

There is no question that monolithic applications can be developed using agile practices, and these are being developed all the time. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) could be used, but the question is—do they use agile practices effectively? Let's examine the following points:

• When there is a high probability of having stories dependent on each other, and there could be various scenarios, a story would not be taken up until the dependent story is complete.
• The build takes more time as the code size increases.
• The frequent deployment of a large monolithic application is a difficult task to achieve.
• You would have to redeploy the whole application even if you updated a single component.
• Redeployment may cause problems to already running components; for example, a job scheduler may change whether components impact it or not.
• The risk of redeployment may increase if a single changed component does not work properly or if it needs more fixes.
• UI developers always need more redeployment, which is quite risky and time-consuming for large monolithic applications.

The preceding issues can be tackled very easily by microservices. For example, UI developers may have their own UI component that can be developed, built, tested, and deployed separately. Similarly, other microservices might also be deployable independently and, because of their autonomous characteristics, the risk of system failure is reduced. Another advantage for development purposes is that UI developers can make use of JSON objects and mock Ajax calls to develop the UI, which can be taken up in an isolated manner. After development is finished, developers can consume the actual APIs and test the functionality. To summarize, you could say that microservices development is swift and it aligns well with the incremental needs of businesses.