Let’s be clear – monolithic architectures do offer some undeniable advantages.
For instance, there’s only one codebase you have to worry about which makes deployment easier and fairly straightforward, at least…at first.
As your codebase expands, your organization can run headlong into one of the key limitations of this architecture style, scalability.
Once your monolith passes a certain point of size, releases become more complicated to wrangle and whole portions of the code that should not have been forgotten become lost.
This has led many enterprises to decompose their monolithic architectures, breaking them down into their composite services, and restyling them into microservices-driven architectures.
According to O’Reilly, this isn’t an uncommon practice.
In a survey taken last year, O’Reilly reported that:
“Almost one-third (29%) of respondents say their employers are migrating or implementing a majority of their systems (more than 50%) using microservices.”
If you’ve decided to embark on this path and want to mitigate the risk of downtime, there’s only one surefire way to go about it, methodically.
Check out the infographic below to get a snapshot of all three phases each decomposition should go through.
What This Means For You
Decomposing a monolith basically comes down to three C’s:
- Capture
- Communication
- Capabilities
However, merely implementing microservices in place of a monolith isn’t a cure in itself – they aren’t some sort of business panacea (though that’d be nice).
As the number of microservices involved in a single business process increases, serious drawbacks can occur if you’re not careful.
Orchestrating and monitoring business processes end-to-end can turn into a nightmare and severely limit scalability, eliminating any benefits the use of microservices may have had.
That makes it vitally important to carefully think through and map out your journey as you decompose your monolith and continue to build upon your newly established architecture with microservices.
What’s Next?
For more information on this topic, we recommend checking out our collection of microservices resources, Ultimate Guide to Process Automation and Microservices. Inside, you’ll find a collection of webinars, white papers, and blog posts to provide you with best practices and tips around leveraging microservices in your automation program.
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