What is microservice architecture and what are its pros and cons compared to monolith?

Microservice architecture is an approach to building applications where the system is broken down into many small, independent services, each responsible for its own business functionality and interacting with others through well-defined APIs.

Advantages of microservices compared to monoliths:

• Scalability: individual services can be scaled, rather than the entire application.
• Independent development and deployment: teams can work in parallel on different services.
• Resilience: failure of one service does not bring down the entire system.
• Technology flexibility: different services can be written in different languages and use different technologies.

Disadvantages:

• Management complexity: orchestration, monitoring, and logging of many services are required.
• Difficulties with transactions and data consistency.
• Increased infrastructure requirements (network, security).
• Latency due to network calls between services.

Unlike monoliths, where the entire application is a single unit, microservices offer greater flexibility and scalability but require more mature infrastructure and processes.