Truly greenfield development of microservices-based applications is relatively rare. Many organizations that want to adopt microservices already have a monolithic application. As I describe in chapter 13 of my book, the recommended approach is to use the Strangler application pattern and incrementally migrate function from the monolith into services.
These presentations are good overviews:
The FTGO monolith (see source code) is the monolithic version of the microservices-based FTGO application. Its goal is to demonstrate how to refactor a monolithic application into services using the Strangler pattern. It’s used as an example in both my book and in my presentations about refactoring.
Chapter 13 of my book describes how to refactor a monolith to microservices. There are two main refactoring strategies:
Let’s look at each one.
A good way to begin the migration to microservices is to implement significant new functionality as services. This is sometimes easier than breaking apart of the monolith. It also demonstrates to the business that using microservices significantly accelerates software delivery.
While implementing new functionality as services is extremely useful, the only way of eliminating the monolith is to incrementally extract modules out of the monolith and convert them into services. Here is an example of extracting a service from a monolith.
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Microservices.io is created by Chris Richardson, software architect, creator of the original CloudFoundry.com, and author of Microservices Patterns. Chris advises organizations on modernization, architecture, and building systems that avoid becoming modern legacy systems.
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I am very excited to announce that the MEAP for the second edition of my book, Microservices Patterns is now available!
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