XME Advice: Is It Worth Moving From Monolithic Architecture to Microservice-Based Software?
In this Article:
4. Afterword
The more time you spend on the product update, the fewer clients go to your competitors. To fit consumers' demands, your business should be flexible. Following the McKinsey survey, 90% of responded companies believe that a pandemic crisis will change how they do business over the next five years. It means that enterprises will perform transformations to adopt IT infrastructure and commercial offers to a new reality.
When it comes to digital product development or update, its architecture issues become crucial. 61% of companies highlighted that technical limitations from legacy architectures hinder their digital strategies, requiring a balance between both.
This choice influences the investment, time and resources you put in. Especially when cutting-edge technology, products, and a few new services you need to integrate into your client's architecture landscape. The price for robustness becomes too high - limitations in scalability and constant growth of complexity. The road to innovations becomes hard. One of the most popular inquiries from XME.digital clients refers to overcoming limitations of the monolithic architecture inside medium and large-scale enterprises.
Is there any way out? We say yes! Monolithic code changing and software architecture design rethinking.
What is a monolithic approach?
Monolithic architecture is a traditional style of building an application as one unit when all the components (e.g. user interface, a server-side application, and a database) are managed and served in one place.
It means that if there is any feature update required, any developer can do this by accessing the same code base and making changes in the whole stack at once.
Example of a monolith architecture approach
It could be an e-commerce app like Zaful, Joom, Kasta, etc., aimed to authorize customers, payment, take an order, check inventory, and ship ordered products. It includes the following components: user interface and relevant back-end services.
It is built and deployed as one app for desktop, mobile, and tablet using RDBMS as a data source.
Monolith architecture for businesses: Pros and Cons
A monolith app is considered simple but too slow and hard to maintain. This causes obstacles for business growth. That is the reason why Netflix, Amazon, and Google have switched to microservices. If you are not ready to migrate just right now, you can use microservices integration platforms like XME.digital as your middleware solution. It will help you tie new products and solutions for your customers and scale your business with less effort.
Microservices vs Monolith: Microservices as a solution to the monolith issues
Microservice architecture is “... an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.”
Let's review why it is considered a trend in digital product development and a solution to many of the disadvantages of a monolith.
The reasons are clear, but where to start?
How to convert a monolithic application to microservices?
The key point here is not to change the app's architecture but to transform the business processes. Thus, you should have a clear understanding of what goal to achieve. Do you want to:
Adopt new technologies and processes?
Boost the frequency of your app releases?
Scale in the cloud?
The answer will influence the approach you choose. There are two types of migration strategy organization:
Planning the transformation of the business processes, and then – a tech part piece by piece.
Migrating both business processes and technical background at once, by blocks. But what about the blocks' division? There are two approaches here:
Monolith division based on its technical features. As a result of such a transition to monolith can be an API microservice of the project aimed to protect the system.
Switching to microservices based on the bounded contexts by defining the project boundaries with low coupling and high cohesion. For example, it could be an event agency with autonomous payment systems, accounting, scheduling based on microservices with a minimum coupling.
The second one is the most effective, but the first one is also in use. After choosing the microservice transition model, you go to the organization moments:
Measure the goal you want to achieve: deployment time, frequency, etc.
Decide whether to form an in-house, remote developers team or delegate this task to an IT outsourcing company. There should be cross-functional teams that can design, build, deploy, and support service independently.
Don't update the features of a monolith.
Create the Development Backlog with all the changes your application needs: anti-corruption layer, monolith modules dependencies, development tools, Change Data Capture, code infrastructure, etc.
Do that change and test it.
Afterword
Of course, there will be additional challenges when moving from monolith to microservices. There is no silver bullet. Anyway, the proper choice of an experienced partner and a proven solution will mitigate technical risks for you in this way. You can always contact XME.digital experts to find better solutions for your business.
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