Mridul Sarkar, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Granicus
A monolithic application is created as a single unit that contains all of the steps required to perform a specific function. These systems have enormous codebases due to their extensive scope. The monolithic design is a barrier to expansion as business objectives and expectations change over time, necessitating fresh integration requirements. They are less nimble than what the demands of modern cloud applications require because they are intended as a single service, meaning that if changes are needed for any one component, all other components would also need to be modified
As a result, an increasing number of organizations are switching to a more distributed architecture like microservices. Microservices, which are a collection of loosely connected services, can be used to construct software systems. As opposed to the monolithic method, each component in this scenario would be running in its own process, independently deployable and can be owned by small self-contained teams
This strategy can offer organisations a number of advantages. Because they are so much more efficient than conventional systems, microservices lower total costs. The ability to scale horizontally is its largest benefit because businesses need to respond rapidly to market developments. Organizations have better control over their applications thanks to the transparent and decentralised ownership of the data. Microservices are a better choice for resilience as the entire application is not affected if one or more microservices fail. Also gives organizations choice to develop services independently in tech stacks of their choice
Organizations must first realise that when there is a rainbow, there will also be rain before they can leap without thinking. Let's examine the best ways for organisations to accomplish this transition and the kinds of obstacles they may encounter along the route.
Conscious Decoupling Requires Planning and Time
Organization operating out of large and complex monolithic systems might find the cloud transition challenging, therefore, requires careful and thoughtful planning to gauge its fitness for the purpose.
Before starting to decouple a monolithic application, technology leaders must assess its cloud readiness. Moving from a single repository to multiple can lead to application complexity. Organisations must worry about the health of several applications now instead of just one.
When a database is fragmented, it can be difficult to communicate effectively across them because each microservice is linked to a different database. Testing for vulnerabilities across the application components may become increasingly difficult, and optimising and scaling these services will call for more complex coordination. It will take cross-functional expert assistance during the planning, development, testing, deployment, and post-deployment stages to decouple a monolithic structure and host it on the cloud. The resources needed to complete this would be considerable, raising the overall cost of migration
Despite these challenges, the spike in microservices adoption confirms that businesses are benefiting by this transformation.
Building a Framework for Resilience
Microservices are the best way to embrace a culture of automation, improved scalability, manageability and agility. Once organizations have decided to rewrite their legacy applications to cater to the ever-changing technology landscape.
The identification of cyclic dependencies between components and services is the first step in the migration process. Components that can be conceptually isolated and scaled independently must then be given priority. Moving functionality from monoliths to microservices is an iterative process. End users want interactions to deliver the appropriate data at the appropriate moment, therefore design developers must take the proper collection of data objects and data actions into consideration for effective implementation
The Strangler Fig application paradigm can be used by the design team to incrementally convert a monolithic application into microservices by substituting a specific functionality with a new service. When the new functionality is finished, the old component is "strangled," or retired, and the new service is launched. Any new developments are made in conjunction with the new service rather than as an independent project. It stands for Transform, Co-Exist and Eliminate. Alternately, they could divide the monolithic application into components and domains in accordance with domain-driven design (DDD). Here, we establish the components of the fundamental business model, including entities, aggregates, and services.
After the application has been decomposed into constituent microservices, modern orchestration tools and Cloud DevOps can be used to manage the lifecycle of each service.
Since the microservice architecture is spread across multiple services, API Gateway can be introduced and new extensible APIs can be exposed to define standard responses. These gateways can also be leveraged to implement security measures such as client authorization, a robust inter-service communication mechanism, back-end-for-front-end paradigm, etc.
Despite the fact that the transitional period can initially take up too much of a company's time and resources, this transformation can actually help the company grow at a pace that corresponds to the shift in expectations
Now is The Time
Rapid, agile, and flexible are three words that have become essential in all aspects of the business, and not just in technology. With the announcement of 5G capabilities in the country, businesses now need cloud-native infrastructures and automated delivery pipelines more than ever. Due to the unprecedented demand for all types of services, customers want their demands to be satisfied as quickly as is practical. There is no sign of this tendency abating any time soon. Thus, adopting a microservices strategy could very well be the long-term answer to ensuring the viability of an organisation.
