Decomposing Monolith to
Microservices – The 5 Challenges to Overcome for Cloud Transformation

Are you one of those who are troubled with the gigantic task of managing age-old monolithic applications and looking for a futuristic cloud transformation to microservices-based architecture? Let’s make this journey easy and cost-effective by identifying the key challenges that can impact such transformation.

Characteristics of a Typical Monolithic Application

• Single codebase managing all the events and objects
• Tightly coupled architecture
• Centralized database for data storage
• Functions and objects have access to this centralized database

How the Cloud Transformation from Monolith to Microservices makes your Life Easy?

Decoupling monoliths into microservices helps in better and faster development by leveraging CI/CD. Microservices-based architecture is more adaptable to automation as compared to monoliths. As the applications are decomposed into small services, it is easy to imbibe automation phase-wise without impacting the overall business functionality. Also, the agile methodology and CI/CD enables to add feature upgrades easily and in minimal time.

For managing microservices, you don’t need to have big teams in place. Just small, cross-functional teams can handle it in an agile way. This leads to optimum use of resources at hand and teams can work independently, thereby delivering in parallel to each other. Also, testing becomes simple, and you can identify defects early in the development cycle, thus ensuring a rich experience for end users.

The 5 Challenges in Transforming a Monolith to Microservices and Performing Cloud Migration

• Selecting the right candidate for assessment and transformationIt is extremely critical to analyze cloud readiness of the monolithic applications that you want to decompose to microservices for cloud modernization. You need to assess the applications thoroughly to understand the technical stack and architecture they are built on. This can become cumbersome, especially if the monoliths are decades old and you don’t have SMEs or the documentation to analyze the applications thoroughly. Amaze^® (Hexaware’s proprietary enterprise applications cloud modernization product suite for legacy Java, .NET, and TIBCO BW applications with Oracle, DB2, or Sybase database) can help to tackle this challenge easily as it comes with an automated assessment engine that can assess your monoliths in just hours without any dependency on SMEs or documentation.
• Picking the right R treatmentJust decomposing monoliths into microservices won’t save you costs unless you perform cloud migration of these microservices by adopting a suitable R treatment (Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retain, Rewrite, or Retire). Also, it can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach for all the applications as the effectiveness of the R treatment depends largely on the architecture and usability of the applications and the type of database they have. Once amaze^® assesses your monolith for conversion to microservices and cloud readiness, it generates a report that gives a detailed view of your application with respect to technology, architecture, key business services, database type, etc. By taking this as a base, our cloud experts can suggest the most feasible R treatment for your application and can also define a suitable roadmap for the same.
• Predicting the timeline for end-to-end cloud transformation This is probably the most important challenge (and many a times a deterrent) in adopting full-fledged cloud migration. Many a times, organizations are skeptical about the timelines provided by their vendors for disintegrating monoliths into microservices and then taking these microservices to the cloud. In most cases, the timelines for such transformation range between several months to years, depending upon the application size and complexity. In such scenarios, amaze^® provides you the best platform for rapid cloud migration in just 6-8 weeks, thanks to its class-leading automation and intelligent code refactoring engine.
• What should be the team structure?Converting a monolith to microservices and hosting it on a suitable cloud platform involves a lot of expertise across functions like assessment, strategy planning, development, testing, deployment on the cloud, support and maintenance post cloud migration, and so on. If we go by conventional methods of cloud transformation, the journey would involve multiple teams with a large number of resources. This would not only inflate the cost of migration, but also make it difficult to stick to desired team velocity and monitor progress effectively. Amaze^® takes away all your worries by performing most of the above functions in an automated way and enables your teams to focus only on the critical tasks. This increases the development productivity by up to 25% and helps teams to progress in parallel and in sync with each other. Also, the overall cloud migration process becomes at least 50% faster if done with amaze^®.
• Managing IT spendsAs discussed, there are a lot of functions involved in decomposing monoliths into microservices and performing cloud transformation for better scalability, flexibility, and seamless application performance experience. Most cloud journeys hit a deadlock mid-way due to rising IT spends, most of which are recurring. A major portion of these spends goes into licensing costs charged by vendors for utilizing platforms, cloud services, etc. Amaze^® gives you a winning spot here too by eliminating licensing costs and minimizing your dependency on vendors. Amaze^® leverages open-source platforms for cloud migration, thereby saving a majority of IT spends. Also, we have partnered with hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and GCP to provide a highly futuristic cloud management platform for our clients with huge cost savings. All this brings down your TCO and implementation costs by more than 50% with amaze^®.

Why Amaze^® for Seamless Cloud Transformation of Monoliths?

Amaze^® is a SaaS-based product suite that can get adapted to your environment with ease. It comes with a host of cloud transformation options for infrastructure, application, and data and provides you with the best overall cost reduction of more than 50%. Amaze^® adheres to an automation-first approach and reduces majority of your manual efforts at all the stages of cloud migration. It enables you to identify blockers and decompose monoliths into macro/micro services with advanced API enablement and AI functionality for a rich user experience. Also, there is no change in the business functionality of your application once it starts working from the cloud.

Amaze^® follows an agile-based development approach with CI/CD automation. This helps development teams to develop and add new features with ease and in alignment with client requirements. Also, it can identify potential business services for conversion, group them to convert into microservices, and then replatform these microservices with REST API endpoints.

Excited about cloud modernizing your monoliths the microservices way with amaze^®? Reach us now at amaze@hexaware.com