Microservice Architecture
Supported by KongRefactoring a monolith to microservices
Truly greenfield development of microservices-based applications is relatively rare. Many organizations that want to adopt microservices already have a monolithic application. As I describe in chapter 13 of my book, the recommended approach is to use the Strangler application pattern and incrementally migrate function from the monolith into services.
Presentations on refactoring
These presentations are good overviews:
- Considering Migrating a Monolith to Microservices? A Dark Energy, Dark Matter Perspective
- DevNexus 2020
- Oracle Code One 2019 talk
- Six principles for refactoring a monolith to microservices
- Ten principles for refactoring a monolith to microservices - an expanded version of the six principle talk. Sadly, there was a glitch at the start of the talk that messed up the beginning of the talk.
About the FTGO monolith
The FTGO monolith (see source code) is the monolithic version of the microservices-based FTGO application. Its goal is to demonstrate how to refactor a monolithic application into services using the Stranger pattern. It’s used as an example in both my book and in my presentations about refactoring.
Refactoring strategies
Chapter 13 of my book describes how to refactor a monolith to microservices. There are two main refactoring strategies:
- Implement new functionality as services
- Extract services from the monolith
Let’s look at each one.
Implement new functionality as services
A good way to begin the migration to microservices is to implement significant new functionality as services. This is sometimes easier than breaking apart of the monolith. It also demonstrates to the business that using microservices significantly accelerates software delivery.
Extract services from the monolith
While implementing new functionality as services is extremely useful, the only way of eliminating the monolith is to incrementally extract modules out of the monolith and convert them into services.
For example, let’s imagine that the FTGO team wants to improve the efficiency of the business and customer satisfaction by rapidly iterating on the courier scheduling algorithm.
It will be a lot easier for them to work on the delivery management logic if it’s a separate Delivery Service.
To do that, the FTGO team must separate delivery management from order management and convert it into service.
Extracting the Delivery Service consists of the following the steps:
- Split the code and convert delivery management into a separate, loosely coupled module within the monolith
- Split the database and define a separate schema for delivery management.
- Define a standalone
Delivery Service - Use the standalone
Delivery Service - Remove the old and now unused delivery management functionality from the FTGO monolith
Before looking at each of these steps, let’s first review the AS-IS code.
Step 0: Review AS-IS code
In the FTGO monolithic application, Order management and Delivery management are intertwined as shown in this diagram.
Read more about the AS-IS architecture.
Step 1: Split the code
The first step is to split the code and convert delivery management into a separate, loosely coupled module within the monolith.
Read more about how the code is split.
Step 2: Split the database
The second step is split the database and define a separate database schema for the ftgo-delivery-service module.
Read more about splitting the database.
Step 3: Define a standalone Delivery Service
The third step of the refactoring process is to define a standalone Delivery Service and deploy it.
The service does not, however, handle production traffic.
Instead, it can, for example, be tested in production.
Read more about defining standalone Delivery Service.
Step 4: Use the standalone Delivery Service
The fourth step of the refactoring process is to use the standalone Delivery Service.
Read more about how to route production traffic to the Delivery Service.
Step 5: Remove the delivery management functionality from the FTGO monolith
The fifth step of the refactoring process is to remove the now obsolete delivery management logic from the monolith.
Read more about removing the obsolete code.
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