Migration of monolithic applications to microservices
Most existing corporate applications still have a monolithic architecture. However, microservice architecture is gaining popularity and it becomes the only realistic solution when the system becomes too large and complex or needs to be migrated to the cloud. It is common practice to break a monolith into small, self-contained chunks, each deployed and maintained by an agile team who deal will a determined set of interrelated domain-specific functions, such as customer account management, order management, or bill payment services.
Key reasons to introduce a microservices architecture
The microservice architecture has been designed to meet the demands of today's market. Companies must analyze their data, innovate, and launch new products and services better and faster than their competitors. They need to be flexible to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers. Moving to a microservice architecture allows them to accomplish this with higher efficiency. The main reasons for converting a monolithic system into a microservice system are:
Business growth
As the application serves more customers and processes more transactions, it requires more capacity and resources.
Existence of peak load
Ideally, the system should scale up automatically, or at least dynamically, so that the infrastructure is not brought to the maximum capacity needed to support a peak load. Scaling up of monolithic applications can often be a challenge.
Faster time to market
There is a significant business value when adding or changing a feature takes days or weeks instead of months and does not require excessive (and often costly) regression testing.
Microservice architecture
Knowledge in the subject area
Monolithic applications can easily create a situation where no single developer or development team understands the integrity of the application.
Reuse
Reuse of monolithic applications is limited.
Operational flexibility
It is not easy to achieve operational flexibility when re-deploying monolithic application artifacts.
Toolbox
By definition, monolithic applications are implemented using a single development stack, which can limit the tools or specialists available to develop parts of an application.
Flexibility
Difficulty adding new functionality on top of an existing monolithic application.
Benefits of a microservice architecture
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Scalability
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Availability
Fault tolerance
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Each microservice can be scaled up independently without affecting other microservices. This is an advantage over a monolithic application where a lot of resources are wasted scaling unnecessary services because they are all packaged together in a single deployable unit.
Even if one service goes down, other microservices remain available, and the failed microservice can be fixed very quickly with minimal downtime. This delivers an advantage over a monolithic application where the entire application must be stopped.
Even if a failure occurs in one of the microservices, for example, exhaustion of the database connection pool, there is a specific boundary for the knock-on effects of any failure. Unlike the monolithic approach, other services run smoothly, and therefore only a small part of the application is affected, rather than the entire application freezing.
Flexibility
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Variety of storage methods
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Ease of maintenance
As mentioned above, changes to a particular microservice can be implemented and deployed very quickly, making it a very suitable architecture for ever-changing business requirements (which means a very flexible environment).
Each microservice can choose its own type of database depending on the specific requirements in each particular case. That is why the application stack is normally not tied to a specific database.
A separate microservice is created for each business service. This means, the code in a microservice is easy to understand as it serves just a single business function. In addition, because microservices serve individual business functions, the size of the codebase is also greatly reduced, making it easier to maintain.
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Software stack independence
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Faster development
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Faster deployment
Because a larger application is split into several smaller microservices, the application is not tied to a single software stack, and therefore different software stacks can be used for different microservices.
Unlike monolithic applications, code changes in microservices can be done very quickly in accordance to changing business requirements, resulting in a faster development cycle.
As the microservice only serves one business function, the amount of code is greatly reduced, allowing for quicker deployment.
How we can help
Support at all project stages
Our experts are experienced in the migration of monolithic applications to the microservice architecture at all stages of the project, starting from restoration of application requirements, business analysis, development of specifications and user interface design, and including development, testing and deployment of applications to the cloud.
Development of microservice applications with wide set of tools
For the development of applications with a microservice architecture Binary Migration uses Angular, Java Spring, .net core, queue services, various relational and non-relational databases, as well as Low-code technologies from Mendix.
Deployment to different cloud platforms
We use cloud technologies from leading companies, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Service, for example, such as OpenShift, based on Kubernetes services and allowing to deploy scalable applications not only in the cloud, but also in our customers’ infrastructure.