Netflix was one of the pioneers in migrating from a monolithic to a cloud-based microservices architecture. In the early 2000s, Netflix faced a significant challenge as its customer base snowballed, straining its IT infrastructure. To address this, the company made a pivotal decision to transition from private data centers to the public cloud and upgrade from a monolithic to a microservices architecture.
This successful shift from monolithic to microservices marked Netflix as a trailblazer in the industry. Today, nearly all tech giants like Google, Twitter, and IBM, have moved to the cloud, while other companies are gradually starting their migration.
Monolithic apps are self-contained systems where the user interface, code, and database exist in a single platform. Unlike modular apps, which allow for individual updates and maintenance, monolithic apps pose significant challenges regarding scalability, maintenance, deployment, etc.
On the other hand, Microservices architecture builds apps that follow a modular design. Modernizing applications enhances scalability, maintainability, security, performance, and innovation, ensuring compatibility with evolving technologies and keeping businesses competitive.
Whether you’re a startup, small, mid-sized, or enterprise-level company, microservice architecture suits all. Implementing modern trends in microservices—like serverless solutions, Kubernetes orchestration, containerization with Docker, and CI/CD pipelines—can help develop future-ready applications.
The following write-up discusses the basics, benefits, and step-wise implementation. Read to the end to learn how to plan a seamless conversion.
Understanding Monolithic and Microservices Architectures:
Let’s understand the specifics of monolithic and microservices architecture.
1. Monolithic Architecture
As the term implies, monolithic architecture is a single-tiered traditional software model with multiple components, such as business logic and data, in one extensive application. Therefore, updating or changing one component requires rewriting other elements and recompiling and testing the entire application.
2. Microservice Architecture
A microservice architecture uses loosely coupled services that can be created, deployed, and maintained independently. Each component is responsible for conducting discrete tasks, and they communicate with each other using simple APIs to attend to more significant business problems.
Why Modernize a Monolithic Application?
Applications today demand scalability and all-time availability. These requisites are best addressed by transitioning to a microservices architecture.
According to a survey from Mordor Intelligence, the cloud microservice market is predicted to grow at a CAGR rate of 22.88%, from $1.63 billion in 2024 to $4.57 billion in 2029. The need for low-cost drives this shift, as do secure IT operations and the adoption of containers and DevOps tools.
Here are the challenges of monolithic apps and the need for modernization:
Monolithic applications are complex and costly to scale due to their interconnected nature.
Updating a monolith often requires downtime and can compromise system stability.
Monolithic architectures hinder the adoption of new technologies, impacting competitiveness.
Outdated technologies limit the functionality and scalability of your application.
Users prefer fast applications; falling behind technologically can cost you customers.
Maintaining apps built on old tech stacks is difficult and costly due to outdated programming languages and scarce expertise.
Advantages of a Microservices Architecture
Here’s a list of some tactical and technical benefits this transition offers.
1. Business Agility
Incorporating microservice architecture makes your system easily adjustable, offering independent components. It helps you adhere to your business needs with less effort while adding, removing, or upgrading features, offering a competitive advantage.
2. Rapid Deployment
With a centralized database, the code used by microservices is more understandable. Changing the code becomes effortless for teams as they can quickly access the dependencies. This saves more time and resources while deploying upgrades.
3. Higher Productivity
Reduced dependencies and independent components allow teams to create, scale, and execute numerous microservices simultaneously, offering more freedom to developers. For example, they can make the best products or services by selecting the coding language, frameworks, and APIs that align with their goals.
4. Resilience
In monolithic applications, modifying one module can disrupt the entire system. In a loosely coupled architecture like microservices, each service isolates its errors, minimizing their impact on the overall system. This shift from monolith to microservices enhances system resilience by reducing the risk of widespread failures.
5. Enhanced Scalability
The best part of microservices architecture lies in its ability to scale individual services independently based on demand. This means that resources can be explicitly allocated to the parts of the application that need them most.
6. Cost Efficiency
Microservices help minimize infrastructure costs by efficiently using cloud resources, scaling as required, and aligning operational expenses with actual usage patterns. Together, these aspects make microservices a cost-effective choice for modern applications.
Read the Full Article: A 10-Step Guide to Migrating From Monolith to Microservices Architecture.