Microservices are a new and evolving architecture for software systems, which uses smaller components for greater effectiveness. Features such as self-healing, fault tolerance and rapid deployment can be delivered in only a few milliseconds.
According to a 2018 poll, 63 percent of businesses have shifted to microservice architecture. The promise of improved resilience, scalability, time to market, and maintenance, among other things, is driving wider adoption.
In a traditional monolithic application, a single, closely-knit software handles all the data objects and activities. Typically, data is kept in a single database or disc. All business logic is contained inside the server codebase and the client application, and functions and methods are built to retrieve the data directly from this storage system.
A microservices-based application, on the other hand, is a single, integrated service made up of several smaller services. Each microservice component focuses on a tiny, well-defined dataset and a set of loosely linked operations. Each microservice has its storage system, allowing all its data to be stored in one place.
[Read More: Monolithic Vs Microservices Architecture]
Microservices are not simply good from an architectural point of view. They are also useful to software engineers, who can get rid of the ‘machinery-y’ feeling that they often have when they try to use traditional software engineering techniques (e.g., design patterns, TDD, etc.). Microservices make it easy to use the same code base across different projects or teams and therefore make it easier to develop personal skills and competencies than ever before.
How to migrate from monolithic to microservice?
The transition to a microservices architecture is a tricky one. It requires us to realize that not all software teams are the same. And we need to understand the differences between microservices and monolithic architectures to get what we want from them.
Identify the Logical Component
The data utilized in the system consists of three primary components:
A ‘data object’ is a storage area that holds a value or a set of values.
‘Data actions’ are used to retrieve data from a web service and conduct activities with it (such as adding specific customer data to agent scripts).
The ‘job to do’ is the function that is invoked to perform a task on the supplied data.
All three components of the system- data objects, data actions, and tasks to execute must be determined when integrating various systems into a single strategy. In the codebase, these components are implemented as modules. The system architects will only be able to decide the actions to be performed on the data sets that will be useful in the application’s subsequent phases by identifying these components.
Flatten or Refactor Components
Once all the modules and components have been uniquely recognized and labelled, these groups need to be organized internally. Before implementing microservice architecture, components with comparable functionalities must be addressed. In the end, each task must be performed by a single microservice.
Identify the Dependencies of the Components
The system architects must determine the relationships between the components after identifying and rearranging the components. Architects may do this by looking for calls between various libraries and data types in the source code using static analysis.
Components Group Identification
Following the identification of components and dependencies, architects must concentrate on organizing the components into coherent groupings that may be converted into microservices. The goal of this phase is to find a limited group of objects and their constituent activities that should be logically segregated in the final system.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for Remote User Interface
The remote user interface is the sole way for the system, its components, and its users to communicate. As the system grows over time, the remote user interface must be adaptable to accommodate new features and technologies. The goal of this phase is to provide a uniform API (Application Programming Interfaces) that allows users to interact with the system and change data. The remote user interface is only a platform for the user, machines, and data to communicate. This API is the foundation for everything else.
Migrate Components to Macro-service
Microservices enable more sophisticated data object interactions and have a more flexible attitude regarding sharing data repositories. Monolithic systems are difficult to convert to microservices because they are constructed with interwoven logic, which might pose problems while converting to microservices. As a result, this step of converting to macro-services is essential while transitioning your monolithic system to microservices.
This step’s objective is to divide the components into distinct projects and deploy them separately.
Migrate Macro-services to Microservices
The system architects must migrate the components of a monolithic application to macro-service and then to microservice. Using macro-services as an intermediate phase makes the migration simple and quick since it reveals how these components may be further separated into microservices.
Deployment and Testing
Integration testing and deployment are the next steps once a microservice is ready for deployment. The monolithic system must be configured to use the new service instead of the traditional data store for its data needs.
It might be difficult to track down all calls to the datastore from the monolithic old system. It may be feasible to delete historical data relating to the transferred datasets for which the new microservice is now accountable in a testing environment.
Conclusion
This approach for shifting current monolithic systems to microservices is designed to help companies realize the benefits of microservice architectures, such as robustness, scalability, shorter lead times, and simpler maintenance while minimizing interruption to existing applications and services. Planet of IT assists in the creation of a monitoring excellence center by simplifying even the most complex infrastructure with Application Insights, Monitoring, Alerting, Log management, and Analytics, which help assess, determine, and fix performance issues before they have an impact on business results. Contact us if you need help or guidance to make the transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices one.