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by sdrwefgfvb 1427 days ago
Well if you're distributing requests over multiple servers, I wouldn't call that a monolith.
7 comments

You're mistaken then. Monolith is just project organization. Think microservices and then realize the monolith is on the other end of the spectrum. It's in the name.
You keep posting this. A monolith is a software architecture. It says nothing about there being one instance of that monolithic process or a billion any more than "microservice architecture" becomes untrue unless you have k instances of any particular service.

It's like saying "this thing says it is built as a suspension bridge, but there are ten of them, so I wouldn't call it a bridge."

Here is some Microsoft documentation describing how a monolith application can be deployed behind a load balancer[0]. HTH

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/contain...

If your definition of a monolith refers to a singular server, then I've never worked on a monolith in my life. Even the crufty old ASP apps I used to work on weren't monoliths.

This would also mean that deploying a microservice architecture onto a single server, using docker for example, would be considered a monolith. Or even better, any application that leverages a database on a separate server is no longer a monolith! That's way easier than rearchitecting your whole app.

I've never come across a definition for monolith in the context of software that had anything to do with the actual infrastructure employed

Nevertheless, that's a pretty common term when the compute portion of the application is a single tier, but that doesn't mean that the tier can't scale over many stateless compute nodes.
I believe you're alone in using that definition
Monolith refers mostly to the code, not the distribution of app servers. There's one app (a monolith) served multiple times.