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Using the Strangler Pattern to Break Down Your E-Commerce Monolith

Introduction

Monolithic platforms like Shopify, Oracle ATG, and BigCommerce are easy to get up and running. However, they lock you into various platform-specific limitations. As a result, you're subject to each platform’s constraints and may feel stuck using one-size-fits-all software.

You face similar challenges if you’ve built your own e-commerce monolith. When more components of the application are intertwined, it is harder to modify features, scale components, or divide the work. After years of using one of these systems, technical debt builds up, and changes are hard to implement.

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Microservices Architecture: Breaking the Monolith

This article summarizes the webinar ‘Breaking The Monolith’, presented by Daniel Gutiérrez Saavedra, Senior Software Engineer at Zartis. You can watch the full webinar, which also includes a Q&A session below!

Are you working with monolithic systems and legacy applications? Are you looking for ways to modernize your architecture and switch to microservices? This article will cover the ways you can break up a monolithic application into smaller pieces that make up a modular system.

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From the Simple to the Complex: Monolith vs. Microservices

Working in the software development industry, I often see articles on monolith pros and cons, microservices pros and cons, monolith vs. microservices, etc. — and much less often about the correct transitions between architectural approaches and their interactions. While projects can grow rapidly or dramatically change their course of development, you need to know when and what architectural approach will help support the system.

This article is for those for whom the monolith hasn’t solved problems and only aggravates all processes. It will also come in handy for those who are just getting acquainted with microservices. I will not say which is better, but I will share my experience of migrating from a monolithic to a microservice architecture.

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Why Transition From Monolith to Microservices?

Microservices architecture is a way of creating applications through loosely coupling services. Every service represents a system component that can be created and maintained separately, executing an independent business goal. In this article, we’ll discuss why you should transition from monolith to microservices.

Monolith Architecture

The traditional application architecture is monolithic. The monolithic approach means creating the application as a single unit that contains all the functional components, including database operations, business logic, background processing, etc. They are all deployed together at the same time and running on the same servers.

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Making the Case for a Monolithic Architecture

When microservices became popular in the past decade, everybody hailed them as the nail in the coffin of monolithic architecture. Given all of the advantages of that microservices offer, it is easy to see why this was the case. Still, there are certain situations when a monolithic architecture would serve you best. In my previous article, I explored some of the challenges that microservices offer, and today I would like to take this topic one step further. Let's take a look at some of the benefits of the monolith so you can decide if it is right for you. 

Simpler Tracking and Monitoring 

Microservices is all about taking independent technologies and sticking them together. However, how do you know whether any or all of the services are performing the way they should be? While there are tools available that can help you with this, you will still need to spend time integrating them. This, by itself, could get very costly. While many people would say that one of the advantages that microservices offer is the fault tolerance, it will still be difficult to find those points of failure manually. This is because microservices, by their very nature, are decoupled and you will need to integrate some monitoring tools which will increase costs. 

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A Guide to Understanding Sidecar Deployment With Istio Service Mesh

Industry analysts predict that 83% of all enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by the end of 2020. To leverage the scalability and flexibility of the cloud, developers can deploy independent microservices into their cloud environments. Yet, transitioning to a distributed microservice architecture isn't without its challenges. As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to connect, secure, control, and monitor those services.

That's where Istio service mesh comes in.

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Things I Have Learned Adopting a Microservice Strategy (Part 2)

In the initial article of my "Things I Have Learned Adopting a Microservice Strategy" series, I focused on the following pitfalls:

  • Monolith -> Microservice Challenge (replacing one huge challenge with an equal challenge)
  • The Underlying Database (trying to make things work using an outdated data model)
  • Monolith -> Multiple Microservices Challenges (introducing a complex web of services)

In this article, I am going to focus on the following challenges:

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Things I Have Learned Adopting a Microservice Strategy (Part 1)

Since 2014, I have been involved with several projects with a goal to convert an existing application to utilize a microservice equipped with a RESTful API. In every case, the desire was to allow a client to make RESTful API calls (as needed) to the microservice for retrieval, persistence and other data processing needs.

I fully believe I am not the only one who has ventured down this course. In fact, in a personal adventure, I did the very same thing for my mother-in-law as documented in my "New Application Journey" series.

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Break a Monolith to Microservices — 12 Best Practices and Design Principles

There was once a time when applications were traditionally developed as monoliths, being packaged into a bundle of code and deployed as a single unit; however, the complexity of sustaining a monolithic architecture coupled with product complexity and lack of speed to evolve has led to enterprises seeking new alternatives to sustainability, flexibility, and ease of integration.

While breaking a monolith and switching to microservice architecture seems easy, many enterprises tend to underestimate the overall complexity of the initiative and make catastrophic mistakes.

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How to Practically Implement Microservices Infrastructure in Your Business

Implementing Microservices infrastructure

The hyper-dynamic approach to business has led to the development of cloud computing in the form of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, with our current buzzword Microservices being aggressively sought for implementation. Notably, tech giants like Google, Walmart, and Amazon using it have grabbed the attention of the masses who look forward to revolutionizing their business processes with a modular approach.

You may also like: Deploying Your Microservices