How to Design a Scalable HRMS Architecture?

Question

I am designing the architecture for an HRMS system that may grow from 200 to 5,000+ employees over time.

Should I adopt a microservices architecture from the beginning, or would a modular monolithic architecture be sufficient initially? How should payroll, attendance, and reporting services be structured to allow future scalability?

Any architectural diagrams or best-practice recommendations would be highly appreciated.

Bohdan Stupak · Answer

From what I view, storing 5000+ employees is not a big deal for any modern software system, especially given the fact that it will be operated by a couple HRs. For that reason, I'd suggest sticking to a modular monolith as microservices are notorious for their overhead connected to inter-process over-the-wire communication, such as the need in distributed tracing and mitigating network latency and microservice failures. I believe that the modest figures you mentioned are the reason why there are no mock system design interviews aimed specifically at HRMS, as in such a case, the simplest solution will be the best. Yet you may have a look at such interviews in other domains to see how people approach functional and non-functional requirements and ask these questions about your system. In case you'll encounter a scalability bottleneck in the future, you might consider extracting those parts into microservices, which is fine as long as those microservices are built around business capabilities, not the entities.

How to Design a Scalable HRMS Architecture?

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