I’m not really arguing which one is easier to run, maintain, or anything; I was just making a point about abstractions and system modularisation.
Hypothetically, I should be able to take a well-designed monolith and “deconstruct” it into a distributed system by deploying modules individually and replacing function calls with network calls. Going the opposite direction, I should be able to do the reverse with a well-structured distributed system.
This pattern of modularisation exists across the software stack; it goes as far as the digital logic level with lumped-element abstraction. In general, we trade-off some benefits with a more complex messaging mechanism, akin to threads sharing the same memory space VS processes communicating through sockets or files. In general these are all technical details that help us accomplish what we need our system to do, but pinning the right abstractions helps us actually reason about our system.
Hypothetically, I should be able to take a well-designed monolith and “deconstruct” it into a distributed system by deploying modules individually and replacing function calls with network calls. Going the opposite direction, I should be able to do the reverse with a well-structured distributed system.
This pattern of modularisation exists across the software stack; it goes as far as the digital logic level with lumped-element abstraction. In general, we trade-off some benefits with a more complex messaging mechanism, akin to threads sharing the same memory space VS processes communicating through sockets or files. In general these are all technical details that help us accomplish what we need our system to do, but pinning the right abstractions helps us actually reason about our system.