How to Seamlessly Migrate from Monolithic to Microservices Architecture

When system dependencies grow, it slows down the innovation. Monolithic architecture is hard to maintain as applications get bigger and more complex. 

To sustain the customer needs, we need to scale up, which can be obtained by adopting a Microservices architecture. Migrating from monolithic to Microservices architecture enhances scalability. It accelerates development cycles and simplifies maintenance. Moving from a monolithic to microservices boosts scalability. It also speeds up development cycles and makes maintenance easier.

In this blog, we will explore the steps for monolithic to microservices migration and how it helps us to achieve 50% faster deployment cycles.

What Makes the Monolithic to Microservices Migration Beneficial?

Monolithic to Microservices migration is beneficial. It solves key issues in large, single-unit applications. This leads to improved scalability, agility, and maintainability.

• Scalability and Flexibility: Microservices enable independent Scaling of each part. This denotes that you can allocate resources only to the services with high traffic. This flexibility lets us pick different technologies. The team can choose the best programming languages and tools for each microservice. It maximizes performance and fosters innovation.
• Faster development cycles: The team works with small, independent services. These can be built, tested, and released often. This allows for quicker development and deployment. This feature reduces complexity, and thus, deployment risk is reduced.
• Easier Maintenance and Updates: Microservices are loosely coupled. If one service fails, it does not halt the entire application. Microservices are easier to maintain and simplify debugging, testing, and upgrading.
• Reduced complexity: Each service focuses on a single business capability. So it is easy for the developers to modify and maintain them.. 
• Enhance cloud compatibility: Microservices architecture supports cloud-native and containerized environments. It promotes agility and improves software quality.

Challenges faced during the Monolithic to Microservices Migration and ways to overcome

Migrating from a Monolithic to a Microservices architecture can improve scalability, flexibility, and speed. It brings its own set of Monolithic to Microservice challenges.

• Complexity: Microservices have a distributed system. Managing multiple microservices increases deployment complexity. With hundreds of pipelines, it is hard to maintain them. To overcome this, implement automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines. Use containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) to automate deployment.
• Infrastructure overhead: Running multiple server databases substantially increases infrastructure and operational expenses. These include tools for service discovery, load balancing, and orchestration. To handle this shift to cloud-based environments. With the auto-scaling feature, we can continuously monitor the size of workloads. 
• Data management and consistency: Each server operates with a separate database. With multiple servers, it is difficult to manage them and requires careful planning for distributed transactions. To overcome this, implement the database per service pattern. Use event-driven communication or sagas for distributed transactions.
• Monitoring and Debugging: In a distributed environment, tracking issues is difficult. To overcome this, use centralized logging and monitoring tools such as ELK Stack, Prometheus, and Grafana. Set up alerts and dashboards.
• Organizational and Cultural Shift: Managing monolithic systems is easy, as it has a single team, but microservices require a change in team structure, workflow, and mindset. To overcome this, form cross-functional teams responsible for specific services. Provide users with training sessions, DevOps, CI/CD, and microservices best practices.

8 Step Monolithic to Microservices Migration Process

Monolithic to Microservices migration requires careful planning and execution. Migration process uses the Strangler Fig Pattern and avoids Big Bang Rewrite. The steps to migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture are 

1. Assessment and Planning: First, start analyzing the objectives for the Monolithic to Microservices migration. Define your needs, whether it is faster feature delivery, better scalability, or cost reduction. Understand the monolithic architecture, its dependencies, modules, and business logic. Hereby, we can identify the bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
2. Select Migration Strategy: Choose any of the migration strategies: strangler Fig, bing-bang refactor, or hybrid. Strangler Fig is recommended for gradual migration rather than a complete rewrite. Decide service communication patterns, data management patterns, and operational model.
3. Define Service boundaries: Break down the application into smaller components based on business domains using techniques like Domain-Driven Design (DDD). It logically groups related functionalities into distinct microservices. 
4. Service Design and Technology Selection: Identify clear boundaries, considering data ownership and interactions. Ensure that each microservice focuses on a single business capability and is loosely coupled with other services. Now it is time to decide on technology stacks, databases, and integration methods. Choose either synchronous, REST, or asynchronous messaging. Every microservice should have its own data stores for loose coupling. Take care in choosing technologies that align with the organization’s existing infrastructure, skillset, and long-term strategic goals. Set up the infrastructure to support microservices deployment and communication. Ensure proper monitoring, logging, and security measures are deployed.
5. Extract and build Microservice: start writing new microservice code from scratch. It implements the same function as monolithic. Use an iterative and incremental approach to start building a few critical microservices. Implement automated testing, continuous integration, and deployment pipelines. 
6. Data management: Choose data migration strategies, dual-write, change data capture, or event sourcing wherever it is appropriate. Implement data synchronization mechanisms such as caching models to maintain data integrity and coherence across microservices.
7. Testing and validation: Thoroughly do unit testing across all services. Implement continuous monitoring and observability to track the performance of each service and system as a whole.
8. Deployment and monitoring: Deploy microservices into production environments using automated deployment pipelines and best practices. Continuously monitor and analyze the runtime of every microservice. Detect the performance bottlenecks, errors, and any scalability issues.

Things to Be Considered Post Monolithic to Microservices Migration

Monolithic to Microservices migration alone is not an end. After a successful migration, post-migration to microservices involves several key considerations to ensure the new architecture functions effectively.

• Monitor and optimize: Continuously monitor multiple services. Use tools like Prometheus or Datadog for real-time insights. Use logging, distributed tracing, and benchmarks to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues.
• CI/CD pipelines: Create automated CI/CD pipelines for every service to simplify deployments. 
• Security and compliance: Maintain clear service boundaries and ensure loose coupling to avoid dependencies. Ensure secure communication channels, such as mutual TLS for inter-service communication.
• Decommission monolithic components: After every component and data extraction, validate it. Decommission the monolithic application code base and its database.

How can Entrans help with Monolithic to Microservices Migration?

Microservice architecture offers many advantages, like agility, scalability, and efficiency. Partnering with a migration partner like Entrans will help you improve performance and scale quickly. 

We begin with a detailed evaluation of monolithic architecture and create a detailed roadmap, and understand their performance bottlenecks and scalability needs. We follow data decentralization, event-driven architecture, and API integration. With the help of skilled expertise, we reduce the downtime and ensure faster deployment cycles.

Want to know more about it? Book a consultation call.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

1. What happens in the Monolithic to Microservices migration?

Monolithic to Microservices migration is a process of breaking a large application into smaller, independent deployable services. These smaller parts can be scaled separately.

2. How long does a monolithic to microservices migration take?

Transition from monolithic to microservices depends on the system’s complexity and, monolith’s size. Typically, it may range from a few months to three years.

3. How does a microservices architecture ensure security?

Microservices architecture ensures security by isolating services, secured APIs, and authentication methods such as OAuth or JWT. They also use encryption to protect data and manage access between two services.

4. How do microservices improve scalability and performance?

Microservices allow independent scaling. That means only high-demand services are scaled out with resources. It saves cost, improves efficiency, and optimizes resource usage.

5. How is data managed in a microservices architecture?

Microservice architecture follows the Database-per-service pattern. Each microservice typically owns its private data store for maximum autonomy.