Today’s business world is growing and experiencing rapid transformation. This means the hanging technologies and practices lead to changes in customer needs and expectations. That is why many entrepreneurs are opting for microservices architecture instead of a monolith architecture.

The process of migrating from monolith architecture to microservices architecture can be complex, especially when you don’t have a clear overview of where to begin. This guide describes informative insights, including the processes, benefits, and challenges & solutions when migrating from monolith to microservices architecture, but before that, what are microservices all about? What about monolith architecture? Let’s take a quick review below:

What is monolith architecture? Quick Overview

Monolithic architecture is a traditional approach used in designing software programs. Monolithic means composed in one block; therefore, in this case, a monolithic architecture includes all components coupled up in one big block that cannot be changed. In monolithic architecture, a single codebase performs varied functionalities in an app. What’s more, the components, together with their relative elements, must be available for the code to work or process software to run.

The fact that all functions within a monolithic architecture are tightly coupled makes everything complex compared to when the functionalities are loosely coupled.

Key features of monolithic architecture

The following features describe best what a monolithic architecture is all about.

• Single database – monolithic architecture uses the same database management system as the main data source.
• Self-contained & unified – monolithic components are independent of other apps.
• Single-tiered – single-tired means several components are tied into one big app. The same app often has an extensive codebase, which makes it complex to manage and update from time to time.
• Single codebase – monolithic architecture uses a single codebase, which means should one component require updates, the other elements too will require changes, hence the need to rework the whole app by recompiling, testing, and deploying.
• Single technology stack – a monolithic architecture uses the same tech stack. This means the development team has to use the same framework, programming language, tools, and platform for the entire project. While this enhances compatibility and reduces operational costs, it limits the developers in terms of innovation, adaptability, and scalability of an app.

Benefits of monolith architecture

Monolithic architecture has some pros that make the project development process seamless. These benefits include the following:

• Easy to test and debug – monolithic architecture advocates for end-to-end testing, which makes it easy for the team to monitor, identify, and fix bugs while maintaining regular upgrades.
• Easy to resolve issues affecting the entire app – issues such as performance monitoring, caching, handling, and logging can arise when using an app. In monolithic architecture, all components are coupled in one place and not dispersed, hence making it easy to manage and control any possible issue.
• Seamless development and deployment processes – in monolithic architecture, only a single directory or file is relevant to process the activities. This makes it easy for even beginner developers to carry out the processes, contrary to the case of microservices, which require a specialized skillset.

Challenges of a monolithic architecture

Monolithic architecture comes with several challenges, thus limiting developers to some extent and business expansion. These challenges or disadvantages of monolithic architecture include the following:

• Limited business agility

Although most of the monolithic architecture challenges concern mostly developers, it is crucial to consider the business side of using monolithic architecture.

Well, monolithic leads to development agility decline since it limits the developers in what they can do to enhance business growth, for instance, responding to market trends and changes. This is because a change in one section of an app affects the functionality of the entire app, thus slowing down development processes. Ideally, the development teams are entirely limited to adjusting changes, even when it is necessary.

From the business perspective, declining business agility leads to declining business growth and expansion; thus, other businesses are taking advantage and grabbing the opportunities to grow and expand their businesses, leaving your business stagnant.

You can overcome this challenge by embracing agile approaches and breaking an app into smaller manageable components to speed up development processes, which accelerates fast time to market while giving the team ultimate flexibility.

• Outdated tech stack limits innovation and diversity

Monolithic architecture depends on a single tech stack. This limits developers from applying the ideal technology to different parts of the app. In fact, today’s businesses and industries are in demand for new technologies and practices, and this lack of flexibility in monolithic architecture affects the development processes in such instances.

Again, customer satisfaction is a key aspect when developing an app. However, monolithic architecture limits the development teams from integrating elements that will enhance customer personalization, for instance and tools necessary for meeting specific user needs. This gives the competitors a smooth opportunity to overtake your business and grab the biggest market share by meeting customer needs simply by exploring different tech stack solutions to achieve diverse goals.

You can overcome this challenge by introducing a polyglot strategy in the monolithic architecture. In this strategy, the development team can use different technologies for different components, thus giving them some level of flexibility.

• Extended time-to-market due to deployment process

The deployment process in monolithic architecture is a complex one. The process involves deploying the whole unit on the go, meaning a slight glitch means restating the whole process from scratch. This leads to increased errors, which increases deployment time, thus delaying time to market thus impacting the business negatively.

An ecommerce site, for instance, when it experiences a glitch in the payment getaway, instead of handling the payment gateway alone, requires redeploying the whole app gain. While this slows down the deployment timeline, it also opens chances for other errors and bugs, making the whole process repetitive and time-wasting.

You can overcome this challenge by embracing CI/CD – continuous integration and continuous deployment methods to streamline all the processes, giving room for small and continuous updates.

• Increased costs due to limited scalability

Horizontal scaling is a big challenge in monolithic architecture since it entails scaling the entire app’s components, including the ones that don’t need extra resources. This leads to increased costs while causing inefficiencies.

Let’s take this example: a giant ecommerce site offering black Friday offers. In this case, the monolithic architecture will fail to scale appropriately since it involves scaling the entire app. It becomes tough for the system to handle the massive traffic, thus limiting the capabilities of the system to perform as anticipated during such an event.

You can solve this challenge by modularizing the system. This is all about breaking the monolithic architecture into minute components that are independent. As a result, the business will simply focus on the core elements that need scaling without focusing on the entire system.

What is Microservices architecture? Quick Overview

Microservice architecture, better known as microservices, is a software development style that involves handling two or more services in an app that are loosely coupled and independently deployable.

The services have their respective small and single team and are arranged according to business logic or business capabilities.

In a nutshell, microservices enhance the process of separating or breaking a large app into small components that are independent.

You can use microservice architecture for website migration, data processing, transactions & invoices, and media content.

Features of microservice architecture

The following features define what microservices are all about:

• Independent deployment

The microservice architecture boasts an independent deployment approach where each service can be improved, updated, and scaled accordingly without interfering with the entire system. It is like renovating a room within a big house without touching other rooms or sections of the house. In this case, other activities continue as usual. Therefore, developers have a lot of flexibility with microservice architecture.

Independent deployment benefits the development team and business as a whole in the following ways:

• Faster development and delivery timelines
• Offers a seamless way to fix issues or add new features within a specific service.
• Enables the development of a product that responds to market demands and trends.

What’s more, developers can easily scale an independent service when the demand in a particular service adjusts without having to scale the whole system. This leads to cost-effectiveness while offering a smooth working environment.

In the end, independent deployment enables businesses to include features and technologies that align with customer demands and market changes.

• Independent services

This is one of the core features of microservices, where there are independent services, with each service designed to perform specific functionalities. It is more like an organization setting with the organization having different departments like marketing, accounts, product development, and such. Each department has its unique tasks and responsibilities, and it functions on its own without depending on or interrupting other department’s progress. This makes scaling easy while promoting rapid development.

With these independent services in microservices, it becomes easy for the teams to introduce new programming languages, tools, and technologies that are best suited for a specific functionality within the bigger system.

In this case, if one service fails, the entire system remains solid. The team only focuses on the affected services instead of focusing on the entire system, as in the case of monolith architecture.

• Technology Agnostic

In a microservice architecture, the teams aren’t limited to a specific tech stack. It is easy to introduce diverse tech stacks and different programming languages for different services within microservices.

This gives the developers the flexibility to choose the exact tools that align with specific functionalities instead of forcing a defined tech stack to suit all functionalities within the system.

• Scalable

Microservice architecture is highly scalable. Each service is independent, hence making it easy to adjust and scale individual services seamlessly without affecting the entire app.

This enhances the performance of the app even when the traffic increases while promoting the maximum use of resources.

• Decentralized Data Management

In microservices, each service manages its own database, i.e., polyglot persistence approach or polyglot databases,

• Inter-service communication

In microservices, individual services interact and coordinate with other services within the entire system (inter-service communication). It is more like diplomats sharing valuable insights between different nations. The inter-service communication in microservices is made possible through APIs like gRPC or REST. The APIs enhance smooth and reliable communication under all circumstances.

This ensures the stability and effective functionality of the entire system under all circumstances.

• Design for failure, Resilience

Microservice architecture is structured to handle failures by implementing relevant actions to counter or manage errors. What’s more, microservices are made to be robust, meaning a failure of one service doesn’t put down the entire system. Since the services are independent, a failure on one side should impact the affected service only. Other services continue with their functionalities as usual.

Advantages of microservices

Some quick advantages of microservices include the following:

• Better team productivity

Microservices architecture boasts defined small teams with specific service processes, i.e., development, deployment, and maintenance, without thinking of the complexities that come with the bigger system.

This gives the teams an easy time focusing on their area of expertise, thus making insightful decisions that will create a smooth working environment, which equals better productivity and high standards of service delivered.

• Cost-effectiveness

Since the teams within microservices focus on defined services, it is easy to allocate resources depending on the nature and efforts required for specific services. This cuts down on overall development and maintenance costs. The respective teams use the resources adequately for respective services, ensuring no resource wastage at all costs.

• Improved scalability

The services within microservices are independent, thus enabling the teams to introduce new components without crashing the entire system. The team is free to choose reliable technologies, tools, and programming languages that fit best specific services.

• Accelerate deployment time

In microservices, the deployment time is faster because the services are independent, meaning the deployment process happens within the service without touching the bigger system, contrary to monolithic architecture, which boasts a complex process of deploying and redeploying the entire system in case of errors.

Of course, smaller decoupled components allow business agility, which enables the team to perform updates while fixing issues in respective services without affecting the entire application.

• Better fault-isolation

Microservices boast compartmentalization, whereby a failure in one service doesn’t affect other services or the entire system’s functionality. All other activities go on as usual in case one service experiences glitches.

Challenges of microservices architecture

Does microservices have some challenges? Below are some of the disadvantages of microservices you should know:

• Data management challenges – It can be complex to maintain data consistency and related processes across different services in microservices.
• You can resolve this challenge by putting in place proper data management and coordination practices that will enhance data integrity.
• Testing complexity – It can be a complex process to perform integration testing in different services within a microservice architecture.
• Increased complexity – components within microservices are highly distributed, with each service dependent on its own. In this case, it can be hard to control service communication. The teams may need to formulate another code to create a smooth communication environment between modules.
• Debugging difficulties – It can be hard to debug a system with several microservices, where each microservice has its defined set of logs.
• Deployment & versioning challenges – it can be hard to coordinate deployment and manage version control across different services within a microservice architecture.

Migrating from monolith to microservices: why migrate from monolith to microservices?

Before we discuss the process of migrating from monolithic architecture to microservices, let’s highlight some of the reasons why a business or organization opts to make this decision. Some of the core reasons why you need to conduct monolith-to-microservices migration include the following:

• Fault isolation

Microservices allow the isolation of services, making each service independent. This enhances the systems’ overall performance since every service is dependent on its own. The issues in one service are isolated and do not affect the whole system.

In monolithic architecture, a failure or a bug in one section of the system means putting the whole system down. For this reason, it becomes vital to opt for microservices instead of monolith.

• Enhanced flexibility

In microservices, the teams aren’t limited to predefined technologies and tools to use in a project. They have the flexibility to choose the most reliable technology or tools relevant to specific services. This enhances productivity, creativity, and overall performance. Each service can be built using reliable programming languages, tools, technologies, and frameworks that suit their functionality best.

This is contrary to monolithic architecture where the teams are limited to predefined tools and technologies to use in a project.

• Seamless maintenance and updating processes

The modular nature of microservice architecture makes the debugging process seamless. Since each service runs on its own, it becomes easy for the team to isolate and identify possible issues and fix them appropriately without affecting the bigger system.

• Faster Development and Deployment

There are reduced delays and complexity in microservices. The teams work independently as they handle specific services and related functionalities. This allows different teams to work at the same time, handling different services by building, testing, and deploying individual services on the go, thus accelerating development and deployment timelines. This enables businesses to take advantage of fast time to market and take a competitive advantage.

What’s more, it is easy and seamless to add new features in microservices as a way of responding to user demands, market changes, and trending technologies. This enhances responsiveness and flexibility in relation to market patterns.

• Better scalability

If you need to scale your business promptly in relation to user needs, then microservice architecture is the ideal solution. With microservices, you can easily scale individual components as you respond to specific needs and demands instead of reworking the entire system.

How to migrate from monolith to microservices: step-by-step process

Having described the core reasons why businesses are migrating from monolith to microservices, what are the steps to follow? Below is a simplified step-by-step process of monolith-to-microservices migration.

• Planning

Start by planning through an in-depth analysis of the existing monolith system. Review the monolithic architecture’s performance, structure, components, and dependencies.

Through this analysis, identify the pain points, dependencies, and components that are limiting you in one way or the other. With the insights collected at the planning stage, you can then create a practical roadmap or plan as you aim to move to microservices.

• Define the goals you want to achieve with microservices

What issues are you experiencing with the monolithic architecture that you want microservices to solve? Is it scalability? Ease of maintenance? Or fault tolerant? Whatever the reasons they are, make sure you figure out how microservices will help you solve the issue and enhance your business expansion.

Figure out the bigger app into smaller manageable modules, then define the components that will remain independent based on their interaction complexity, dependencies, and overall functionality. As you figure this out, prioritize services that directly impact the maintainability and performance of the entire system.

• Mark Microservices Boundaries

Divide the monolith by arranging every microservice in its respective business domain for easy management and to keep the ultimate focus. This helps the respective teams to handle specific tasks independently without relying on the bigger system, which encourages agility and reliability.

Focus on enhancing modularity and minimizing dependencies, as this will enable individual services to manage all the activities and processes on their own.

• Decomposition

Start the decomposition process by prioritizing the most crucial and complex components of the entire system. Arrange the components based on the value they add to your business in daily operations. The prioritized components, when decomposed, should produce massive returns.

• Implement Microservices

You can now use the defined boundaries to break the monolithic architecture into smaller and manageable modules that are independent. This step completes the decomposition process, ensuring each component is well established within the entire system.

You can develop new services or refactor the already existing code using the microservices principles to ensure each service is well-defined, placed, and fully independent.

Above all, there should be well-defined responsibilities within every microservice for easy modularity and maintenance.

• Launch Communication Patterns

At this point, you have almost everything in place. However, before testing, you need to establish clear intercommunication patterns. Start by defining the appropriate communication pattern for event driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, or synchronous REST APIs when processing inter-communication processes. This makes the system to be more flexible and enhances overall performance.

Keep the same communication protocols applied in microservices to promote seamless data interchange and communication between services. Therefore, break down and ensure dependability in the distributed system and align procedures and protocols for handling errors to ensure clear and smooth communication.

• Integration Testing

Perform in-depth integration testing to verify that the microservices in the entire app are fully operational with streamlined communication between the services. Do this by preparing test data that replicates the real-world instances in a more accurate manner.

If possible, automate the tests where applicable to enhance consistency. Above all, track the integrated microservices functionalities and overall performance to identify possible glitches as you rectify them for better stability in the system.

• Performance Testing

After verifying integration testing, you need to do performance testing to ensure the system is stable enough to handle increased traffic without crushing. Therefore, do tests to determine the system’s potentiality to scale with increasing loads. Monitor the response time of individual microservices, then for the entire system. Try and find possible issues and rectify them to ensure the system’s stability when it comes to performance.

Challenges and solutions during migration from monolith to microservices

During monolith-to-microservices migration, there are some inevitable challenges you will experience along the way. Below are the challenges and solutions:

• Monitoring and debugging

Maintaining a stable microservices architecture requires continuous monitoring and resolving arising issues. However, since microservices adopt a distributed nature, it becomes complex to keep monitoring and resolving arising issues among the services. This means the system can encounter performance issues, unusual behaviors, and failures at some points.

Solution: centralized logging, distributed tracking, and continuous monitoring of the system are the solid solutions to this challenge. The centralized logging connects all logs from independent services, thus simplifying the analysis and troubleshooting processes seamlessly. You can also employ Edge delta, a log management solution, to solve the dilemma.

• Increased operational overhead

In microservices, service management is different depending on the services available. This is contrary to the monolithic architecture, where everything is maintained in a single codebase. This means that microservices require different service management to complete deployment processes, which can be costly.

Solution: employ Kubernetes technology, where containerized apps and other microservices are deployed, managed, and scaled automatically with Kubernetes.

• Decomposition complexity

It can be daunting and time-consuming to breakdown monolithic architecture into microservices because of the tightly coupled components, entangled business logic, and hidden dependencies. Isolating individual services can be a challenge because it means interfering with the integrity of the bigger system.

Solution: plan and execute the process by handling one step at a time. Identify the least valuable monolith elements and break them down first. You can then test the new architecture, have an overview using the pilot strategy, and then determine areas to improve without interfering with the stability and functionality of the entire application.

• Inter-Service Communication

In microservices, services need to interact with one another more often to achieve the core business objectives. However, it can be challenging to implement dependable communication among the services due to network latency, service discovery, and fault tolerance. Therefore, services may experience performance issues, irregular service, and loss of messages if there aren’t proper communication channels.

You can put in place solid communication protocols that enhance reliable communication patterns for resolving inter-service communication issues. Google remote procedure call (gRPC) and representational state transfer (REST) are examples of technologies applied in inter-service communication within a microservice architecture.

• Data Management

It can be challenging to ensure proper data management during the monolith-to-microservices migration process. There is data consistency and integrity in monolith because data is easily accessible within a single database.

You can resolve this challenge by putting in place event sources and distributed transaction strategies to resolve data management challenges during microservice migration from monolithic architecture.

Conclusion

Choosing to migrate from monolithic architecture to microservices is the best decision a business can ever make. Better team productivity, business agility, improved scalability, and seamless operations within an organization are among the core benefits of microservices over monolith architecture. In the end, businesses can respond swiftly to market demands and industry trends by implementing creative solutions, thus staying competitive in the market.

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