A monolithic application is built and deployed as a single unit. All its features, such as user accounts, catalog, cart, payments and notifications, live in one codebase and run as one process or package. Monoliths are simple to start with, but as they grow they become hard to change: a small update requires testing and redeploying the whole application, one bug or overloaded feature can bring everything down, and scaling means copying the entire application even if only one part is busy. Large teams working in one codebase also slow one another down.
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