Monolith to Microservices

Love them or hate them, microservices offer many benefits over monoliths. We helped this client convert their datacenter monolith to scalable microservices in Azure.

CONTEXT

Financial services client wanted to leverage the benefits of the cloud and reduce IT Operations costs.

SOLUTION

Rewrite, refactor, and replatform on-premise systems to leverage the scalability, availability, and agility offered by Azure. Additionally, revise and restructure teams, processes, and organizational structures to implement a successful governance model.

DETAILS

Firstly, our team led a comprehensive services mapping exercise. Once confirming the scope and transformation roadmap, we stood up operations, engineering, and infrastructure towers to begin migration efforts.

Using a phased approach, we were able to identify critical components and dependencies that needed to be included in the initial migration. From there, we were able to install API appliances to do incremental cutovers of remaining functions.

New microservices were deployed to Azure App Services and Azure Kubernetes Services to take advantage of development speed and operational efficiencies. With security being a top consideration, the client was able to burn down thousands of vulnerabilities every month by leveraging containerized workloads.

Additionally, our client was able to realize the benefits of scalable workloads, increased development velocity, reduced downtime, and was ultimately able to realize significant operational cost savings.

During this engagement, we were also able to help the client realign organization structure to fully adopt a ‘technology first’ approach, which included changes to leadership teams, financial processes, governance processes, and operations processes.

Some of the most important technologies that led to the success of this transformation included:

  • Azure
    • DevOps
    • App Services
    • Kubernetes Service
    • API Management
    • SQL
    • Cosmos
    • EventHub
    • Monitor
    • Log Analytics
    • App Insights
  • Terraform
  • Java
  • Docker
  • Datadog
  • Wiz
  • Dynatrace
  • Cloudflare
  • Swagger
  • Etc.

RESULTS

In summary, by adopting microservices, our client was able to better integrate, scale, and serve customer needs. Not only did our client realize significant savings, they were also able to achieve higher platform stability.

Our client now serves over 150k requests per minute to over 100M customers all year long.

Many projects involve similar technologies and processes, here are some other case studies you may find useful:

Monolith Application Migration

Love them or hate them, microservices offer significant benefits over monolithic architectures.

Generally, microservices allow for increased agility, better fault tolerance, and clear ownership for business-driven decisions.

If your team is experiencing difficulties adding new product features, scaling with a growing customer base, or making timely decisions on critical issues, it may be time to adopt a microservice architecture.

Already tried microservices?

Indeed, up to 80% of digital transformations fail according to Harvard, Forbes, and other studies – and microservices can have a huge impact on their success (or failure). Consequently, many organizations have already tried to adopt microservices in the past and were left with a sour taste from the experience.

Undeniably, many technologists are not experienced enough with microservices and are unlikely to achieve the promised benefits. Symptoms of a poor microservice implementation include:

  • Poor visibility and alerting.
  • Increased triage or incident remediation time.
  • Increased frequency of incidents.
  • Increased operational costs.
  • Unpredictable scaling events.
  • Similar or reduced system stability.
  • And many more.

By the same token, microservices should provide several advantages and fundamentally change the way businesses operate. Hence, successful organizations that employ microservices have different organizational structures than less successful ones.

These successful organizations realize benefits such as:

  • High availability.
  • Faster deployments.
  • Automated operational activities.
  • Increased security.
  • Faster time to market.
  • More frequent, less impactful changes.
  • High cost efficiencies.
  • Improved service accountability.
  • And many more.

For more information, check out some of these interesting reads:

If your organization is interested in discussing microservices further, we would love to learn more about your situation!

– Team Llama 🦙