How to Migrate to Microservices

Migrating to Microservices may be risky, costly, and time-consuming unless the strategy is very well-defined in the beginning. Migrating to Microservices has been beneficial to many Fortune 1000 companies, which confirms its transformation potential to a variety of industries.

Our developers at Charter Global have expertise in Microservices, DevOps & QA Automation. We have successfully implemented in several Fortune 1000 companies, including Financial, Healthcare, and Retail & Media.

Charter Global recommends a practical three-step Microservices approach to focus on the business functionality allowing self-contained units to represent a module’s end-to-end functionality.

Learn More about How to Implement Microservices Framework Developed by Charter Global


Migration Approach

In order to migrate to microservices, you must first make a decision on a microservices architecture. Before trying to optimize its implementation, it is necessary to evaluate how the services will interact. Next, continually optimize those speed gains that microservices architecture provides. This requires flexibility in the tools used in deploying the architecture.

To migrate to microservices, a practical three-step approach is suitable:

Componentize: From your already existing applications, select a component and create a microservices implementation on a pilot basis.

Collaborate:  All stakeholders, programmers, and developers on the team should know about the techniques and lessons learned from the Pilot in Stage One. This keeps them updated with new processes and initiatives.

Connect: Complete the application and connect to users in a real-world scenario.



Microservices Benefits

Microservices Architecture comes with a lot of benefits. Some of which include:

Agility: Banking and Fintech applications are designed to be complex, constantly evolving and scaling, integrating with multiple systems (internal/external) as well as demand high security at various levels. Microservices support greater agility in building and managing these systems making them highly suitable.

Scalability:  Unlike a monolithic application that has a lot of resources wasted for scaling services that are not required since they are all packed together in a single deployable unit, each microservices can scale independently without affecting the other microservices.

Availability: Failure of one microservices does not affect other microservices, as the failed one can be uninstalled and rectified quickly with minimal downtime. It does not require the entire application to be brought down for maintenance, unlike the monolith application.

Maintenance: A separate microservices is created for each business service. This means that the amount of codebase is reduced and functional changes can be faster and more efficient due to the decomposed architecture.

Separation of Business Concerns: Microservices offer a clear separation of business concerns as each Microservices caters to particular business functionality.

Faster Deployment: by catering to single business functionality, the code-based required for microservices are reduced, creating a rapid deployment.


Charter Global

While migrating to microservices might be risky, costly and tasking, the inclusive quality of the application is undeniably bound to increase in the long run, provided that the strategy is rightly planned. Migrating to microservices has been beneficial to Fortune 1000 companies, ultimately confirming its potential for transformation for all varieties of businesses.

Our developers at Charter Global are experts in QA automation, DevOps, and Microservices, providing skilled resources, tools, and guidance in implementing DevOps processes and Microservices architecture.


Wrapping Up

This plan for migrating existing applications to microservices is intended to enable organizations to realize the benefits of microservices architectures, such as resilience, scalability, improved time to market, and easier maintenance, with maximum efficiency and minimal disruption to existing applications and services.

Benefits of Microservices Architecture | Charter Global

1. Scalability:

Each microservice can scale independently without affecting other microservices. Thus, it serves as an advantage over monolithic applications wherein a lot of resources are wasted for scaling unrequired services since they are all packed together into one single deployable Unit.

2. Availability:

Even if one service fails, other microservices are highly available, and the failed microservice can be rectified very quickly with minimal downtime as well. Thus, it serves as an advantage over monolithic applications wherein the entire application must be brought down.

3. Fault Tolerance:

Even if one microservice has faults with regards to, say, a database connection pool getting exhausted. Thus, there is an evident boundary defined with regards to any failure, and unlike in a monolithic approach, other services operate smoothly, and hence only a small part of the application is impacted instead of the entire application bogging down.

4. Agility:
 
As mentioned above, changes in a particular microservice can be completed and deployed very quickly which makes it a highly suitable architecture for ever-changing business requirements (meaning a highly agile environment).

5. Polyglot Persistence:
 
Each microservice can choose its own type of database based on the Use Case requirement. So, in general, the application stack is not tied to a particular database.

6. Maintainability:
 
For each business service, a separate microservice is created. Thus, the business code in a microservice is straightforward to understand since it caters to one business functionality. Also, since microservices caters to single business functionalities, the amount of codebase is also quite reduced, and this makes it highly maintainable.

7. Software Stack agnostic:

Since a bigger application is decomposed into a number of smaller microservices, the application is not tied to a single software stack, and thus different software stacks can be used for different microservices.

8. Faster Development:
 
Unlike monolithic applications, code changes in microservices can be realized very quickly with changes in business requirements to result in a quicker development cycle.

9. Faster Deployment:
 
Since microservice caters to only a single business functionality, the amount of codebase is simplified considerably which creates rapid deployment.

10. Clear Separation of Business Concerns:
 
Each microservice caters to unique business functionality, and thus there is a very clear separation of business concern between each one of them, and thereby each micro-service can be built in a very robust way.

Conclusion

Microservices architectures fit within agile development environment as breaking a monolith into Microservices often aligns with breaking up a silo-oriented team structure into a self-organized and autonomous group. Real-world situations always differ from theory, and the microservices case is no exception. An enterprise should always consider its own business needs, industry threats, and possibilities before deciding to migrate to microservices.

The approaches described earlier are just landmarks to guide you through the migration process. Every business situation is unique and calls for an original solution. Migration to microservices has benefitted fortune 100 companies showing microservices have the transformative potential for all varieties of traditional and modern enterprises. Change is inevitable, and everyone must be ready to embrace it.

Microservices architecture promises to solve the shortcomings of monolithic applications, so many enterprises are interested in migrating their applications to be Microservices. Let’s look at a real-life example (case study) of how Charter Global can help enhance the success of your business.

https://www.charterglobal.com/migrating-to-microservices-from-a-monolithic-applications/