I had the opportunity to meet with Bob Quillen, Chief Ecosystem Officer at vFunction. Bob presented in the Source Lounge in the Developer Hub at JavaOne.
The premise of Bob's presentation is to use AI and automation to refactor monolithic apps into microservices faster, easier, and with less risk.
The Pain
Engineering velocity has slowed. Monolithic applications are hindering innovation due to compounding technical debt. The points of pain include:
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Long test cycles
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Inability to meet business requirements
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Difficult to ramp up developers
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Poor customer and user experience
Technical debt has a people effect as well. Developers don't want to work on legacy code, they want to work on greenfield projects. Another pain is that engineering velocity has slowed. Monolithic applications do not scale and have zero elasticity. This results in out-of-control costs, downtime, and poor user experience.
Microservices are more cost-efficient than monolithic applications. Microservices take advantage of cloud on-demand services like serverless. They also scale. The goal is to break monolithic applications into pieces. Modularize the components into containers. Doing this enables you to see how the code interoperates with each other. Seeing how things connect is a key architecture issue.
Migration to Modernization Strategy
The four stages of a migration to a modernization strategy are: