Evaluating the Performance of Monolithic and Microservices Architectures in an Edge Computing Environment

Edge computing has become a popular paradigm in recent years for reducing network congestion and serving real-time IoT applications by providing services close to end-user devices. It is difficult to develop applications in an edge computing environment due to resource constraints and the diverse and distributed nature of edge computing nodes. The authors compared the performance of monolithic architecture and MicroServices Architecture (MSA) in edge computing environments to determine which architecture can better meet the diverse requirements imposed by edge computing environments. A single application has been developed using both MSA and monolithic architecture for water requirement prediction for irrigation in rice crop. In terms of peak throughput, MSA outperformed monolithic architecture by about 22%, and similarly for peak response times, MSA outperformed monolithic architecture by about 28%. The average CPU usage of MSA is about 49.26% less than the monolithic architecture.