Shalini Manokaran
Author
Businesses today are facing numerous challenges because of their outdated systems. They are unable to make the right decision for their organization, scale, and sustain in the market due to a lack of resources and knowledge. They land opting for the incorrect choices for building their applications resulting in technical debt or no growth.
The race to stay updated is constant and to match the pace, you need to have applications or products that are relevant to the present tech trends. It should help you add or modify the required functionalities and address your on-demand business needs.
While building applications, should you select monolithic architecture or microservices? And if you have a legacy application, should you remain or move to a modular microservices architecture? Let us take a deep dive and understand both to make the right choices for your business!
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Monolithic architecture VS Microservices Architecture
Legacy applications built using monolithic architecture have low compatibility and come with high coupling. Applications built on this architecture are hard to scale. They have all the components of the application living in one place and if you had to make changes to its features or functionalities, they are extremely difficult and eventually become unmanageable.
On the other hand, we have a microservices architecture, that helps organizations build applications rapidly, and split into units or components that can be modified easily as and when needed. This architecture has a well-organized system of low-coupled modules that has a specific task within the application.
The major difference is the architecture itself. The monolith has a single codebase for the UI, frontend, and backend, whereas microservices get a separate database for every functionality or the business logic to perform and they operate independently. Monolith has a single testing and deployment process and the microservices >have them scattered across multiple databases and adapters, with development, testing and deployment individually done.
Let us understand the differences clearly!
Now that we’ve understood the differences, let us look into how we can modernize the applications by migrating to microservices.
Migration process for Monolithic Architecture to Microservices Architecture
Assess
We analyze and assess the existing application to understand the business. We identify the logical components, data objects, data actions, and the job to perform. These components are crucial to understanding the system architecture for further actions to be taken on the data sets.
Identifying the functional gaps and the usability pain points are very important at this stage. Assessing the code written in Java and the traceability matrix are prepared with the data structure.
Plan
Once the modules are identified and grouped, you need to organize the groups internally. When you have multiple monolithic applications that are merged, then you will certainly encounter functionality duplication. You may also have this scenario where you have a legacy code included in the single application. Duplicated functionality in the components must be addressed before the implementation of microservices. There should be only one microservice that will perform a specific action. Determine a final representation for each unique datatype.
Identify the dependencies between the components. Run a static analysis and dynamic analysis to analyze the usage pattern of the application to create a map between the components. 
Once the dependencies are identified, segregate the components in groups that can be transformed into microservices easily without any duplication error.
Transform
The main objective at this stage is to move the grouped components and make separate deployments. The microservices should be deployed independently within the system’s CICD pipeline. 
At this stage, the infrastructure is built. The branching and the deployment pipelines are developed. Databases are created. Code coverage and unit test scripts are executed for further deployment and testing. Finally, a system integration test is also performed.
Deploy
Prepare for the build release for UAT. Arrange for the issue triage, fix, and UAT support. Work on the product deployment and cutover.
So now that you’ve understood the process clearly, you must make the right choice for your business. And what’s better than a perfect strategy, roadmap, and complete guidance & support for making this important migration move? We can help you with the Migration Readiness Assessment!
