This is exactly what I do. When it comes to your regular backend business server I write stateful multithreaded monolith in C++ sitting on the same computer as the database hosted on some multicore server with gobbles of RAM (those are cheap now). Performance is insane and is enough to serve any normal business for years or decades to come.
So it does not work for FAANG companies but what do I care. I have the rest of the world to play with ;)
Even for non-FAANG, less-than-a-million-user business applications, there are two problems:
1. Your feature/function scope is not all fully defined at the start and is not static till the end of life. Software has to evolve with business. In this case, it is easier to build a loosely coupled shared nothing architecture that can scale easily than to build a shared-everything-all-in-one-binary monolith architecture.
2. Your customer base isn't one size fits all. You usually different growing businesses that need solution at different scale points but still with very high unit economics. This means you need a incremental scaling solution – this is where old-school big-chassis systems build blade scalable server architectures. But because of custom/proprietary backplane design they become unmanageably complex and buggy.
Instead, if you build an architecture that can scale the number of corporate users by adding cheap $2k pizza box 1u servers as the company grows, that's much more attractive. Also, you can keep your systems design flexible enough to recompile and take advantage of advancements in hardware tech every 18 months – this gives you better operating margins as your own business starts to grow.
>So it does not work for FAANG companies but what do I care. I have the rest of the world to play with ;)
As long as hype chasers in middle management don't get in the way after convincing themselves they too must be like FAANG with a few orders of magnitude less of a consumer base.
the middle management especially half cooked engineers who drank the cool aid and became managers are hard to reason with.
They want to be both the architect and the manager and anything you say would be over ruled and since they are the boss its hard to ignore them.
This service is a monolith because it has 10K code and it needs to be broken up.The product is at MVP and its rock solid on Java Spring and it hardly crashes.
We are never going to lose data based on the design choices we made.
None of that matters.
We need zero down time upgrade, when we had zero customers.
So it does not work for FAANG companies but what do I care. I have the rest of the world to play with ;)