Map Your Journey to Monolith Modernization
Breaking a monolith application into smaller, more manageable pieces has many benefits. Yet, decomposing a monolith application can be challenging as many are fragile and this task must be handled with care. As such, in today’s article, we’re going to share what resources you’ll need to modernize your monolith.
Think of this not as a recipe, but rather as the ingredients you will need to gather before getting started.
If your monolith is like many, dozens of coders worked on it over the years. In the process, it ballooned from an app with a singular focus to an app with many goals. In these cases, it’s helpful to gather as much tribal knowledge as possible about the app. Know where these resources are and marshal them internally before getting started. Their knowledge of the monolith’s dependencies and other nuances will be incredibly helpful on the journey.
While it’s important to have as much in-depth knowledge as possible about the monolith, it’s also imperative to have a team skilled in cloud native technologies like microservice architectures. If you don’t have these skills in-house, consider hiring a consultant who will teach your team how to fish while helping modernize the monolith.
Key questions to answer before getting started include:
Lewis Carroll once wrote, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Having a concrete plan and a defined path to monolith app modernization is critical to achieving your goal. Some approaches to monolith modernization offer fuller cost optimization than others which will result in better cloud ROI. For example, containerization will help you achieve functionality like auto-scaling and CI/CD capabilities whereas a completely serverless structure will take full advantage of the cloud’s elasticity and cost efficiencies.
Bear in mind that with greater benefits comes greater up-front investments. Therefore, a clear cost-benefit analysis should be completed to know which approach is best for your specific app and the benefits you hope to achieve.
Depending on the outcome of your cost-benefit analysis, there are three common modernization destinations. Note that this is not a linear exercise where you move from one square to the next, but rather one where you decide your destination based on a series of criteria and desired outcomes. Indeed, moving linearly is likely to cost you more in time and resources than if you were to leapfrog directly to your desired end state.
