Best practices for monolithic to microservice transformation

Abstract

Monolithic software systems could become a challenge in certain scenarios when the software system needs to be enhanced. A single change in the system requires full redeployment. This result in high cost of adding new functionalities while reducing the competitive advantage in the market for adding new features, since there has to be a full functional test of the application and this will increase the time a new functionality is introduced to the market. Microservices comes in to play in order to provide a solution. The study is carried out from this research aims to find the best practices when transforming from a monolithic to microservice architecture. This research tries to find the software architecture issues and challenges when changing the software architecture of a monolithic application in to microservice architecture. Microservice architectural style is about an approach which creates a single business application as a set of simple service units. Each service corresponds to a single business process which could run independently. The communication is through light weight mechanisms such as HTTP resource APIs. One single microservice is independently deployable and build around a specific business functionality. The microservice API is the entry point which provides the interface for multi-channel client requests. The implementation logic is hidden behind the API interface, which is in here RESTful web service API. This API accepts and process the client calls. The proposed best practices and methodology can be effectively used in the conversion of monolithic to microservice architecture. This research also considers the practical issues a business will have to face when doing the conversion. The end goal here is to suggest a cost effective and a time efficient technique and best practices with a minimum impact to the existing business logic to convert a monolithic style application architecture in to a microservice architecture.