Reasons to Transform Legacy Apps to Microservices and How to do it
As per the 2018th survey, 63% of organizations were adopting microservice architectures. With the certain pace of change in the tech industry, modern enterprises are experiencing the need to migrate from legacy applications to microservices to boost digital customer experience.
Therefore, from now on, migration will be more crucial for the enterprises to stay one step ahead of the competitor. Such a widespread transformation is propelled by the promise of scalability, resilience, time to market, and maintenance developments.
Also Read: App Modernization for Enterprises — The Transition from Legacy Systems
With the help of easier practices, you can seamlessly transform those apps into microservices. But, the question is the reasons for doing it! Let’s check out the probable reasons and how to do this transformation.
Why transform to microservices?
Precisely speaking, the following 5 reasons can help you prioritize which software assets you must liberate from the legacy apps. Transforming legacy apps or monolith to microservices has numerous advantages, which are the following:
1. Obtain scalability and flexibility
Some high-tech business procedures possess massive utilization at a specific time, for example, fiscal year-end. Therefore, it should be scaled from the rest of the application independently. Some crucial examples of this occurrence are time dependency, sensors producing high data volumes for processing, and seasonality.
On the other hand, autonomous microservices measure everything independently whenever the load is enhanced. The Microservice architecture will initiate service instances.
In case you don’t switch it to microservice and leave the modules in legacy apps framework, you will never have any choice rather than scaling the entire application. Hence, it implies that your hardware and license costs should be sized for the worst-case scenario.
2. A massive rate of transformation
Some of your business procedures might change consistently, and they emerge at distinct speeds or might be in an entirely different direction. It has been observed that approx 10–30% of legacy applications need adaptation to precise business requirements very often, but the rest, to a minor extent. Pertinent processes must be blueprinted to augment adaptability and competitiveness to various market needs.
Also Read: ERP Instance Consolidation
3. Diminution of interaction
In a high-tech world of highly networked services and customers, everyone is searching for the utmost flexibility to switch from one service provider to another. Such a simplification also adds other providers to make sure you are never undersupplied.
This is how the protection of your system from external dependencies can be significantly changed with an abstraction layer. A technical layer conceals the intricacy of the reliance, making transformation hassle-free in the future.
4. Fast test cycles
This is one of the great news of all for enterprises where long test cycles hinder revolution. Not only will an autonomous and small-scale microservice be investigated much expeditiously, but you will also be mesmerized by how much automation is necessary during inspection and deployment. The immediate benefit is that regression, unit, and integration tests could be run numerous times every day.
Microservices help ease the testing process, keep them simple, and maintain different repositories. Therefore, without engaging the business users for inspecting, only a few resources are needed. With a coarse-grained MSA approach after transforming from legacy apps, problems get separated and easily detectable.
5. Isolating failure
Your application might have an external interface, which is known as an untrustworthy service. While using the legacy application, your system may react with an omission, for example, when some data is incomplete or when the system’s uptime doesn’t fulfill your requirements.
Therefore, it’s possible to separate such reliance from the rest of the system and create a failover mechanism in order to maintain consistent data. Here come microservices, which help diminish performance degradation because of untrustworthy third-party dependencies.
In brief, other best advantages of transforming legacy apps to microservices are:
● Increased time-to-market
● Expeditious response to the requirements
● Reduced time and cost
● Create ingenious and nimble solutions
How to transform legacy apps to microservices?
Switching from outdated or core applications to microservices could be an uncomplicated or complex process in terms of the organizational approach. Migrating legacy apps need a massive cultural transformation and an agile approach.
If you are thinking to shift your legacy applications to microservices using any seamless strategy, you need to follow these steps below:
1. Detect logical components
Three leading information components are there with the data utilized in the system:
● Data actions
● Data objects
● Job to execute and various use cases
The data objects are known as the legitimate constructs showcasing the data being used. Here,
In order to migrate legacy apps to microservices, all you need is to identify the components. You should know that such migration doesn’t mainly affect the user interface directly.
Some of the components, which are the best for transformation, are therefore determined by those components:
● Are used most frequently
● Are performing too sluggishly
● Are used by most of the users
● Possess the fewest dependencies on other components
2. Detect component groups
Once the dependencies have been recognized, the system architect must concentrate on grouping those components into undivided groups, which can be migrated into microservices. Such difference between micro and macro services isn’t that important.
Here, the leading goal is to detect their constituent actions and a small set of objects, which must be logically isolated in the final system.
3. Identify component reliance
Once the components have been rescheduled and detected to get prepared for the application migration, the system architect must point out the dependencies among the components. You have to use static analysis to perform this activity and rummage for calls amid distinct datatypes and libraries.
Moreover, innumerable dynamic-analysis tools are there, which can assess the usage patterns during its accomplishment to offer an automated map amid components.
4. Deployment and testing
Once your microservice is up for deployment, the last step should include integration testing. The legacy applications must be configured to utilize the brand-new service for its data requirements instead of its legacy data store.
Although finding all the necessary calls to the datastore from within the legacy applications could be tough. In a top-notch testing environment, it’s important to eliminate the legacy data in terms of the migrated dataset for which the brand-new microservice is liable.
Also Read: Transform your enterprise outlook with Data Modernization
All the crucial functions that access the shifted data must be inspected in all user interfaces to ensure there is no function, which still tries to utilize the outdated datastore via a non-identifiable method. Once testing is done, it will indicate the remaining legacy application code is accessing the brand new service for its details.
Conclusion
Moving to Microservices architecture is a stunning plan when you are running on existing legacy applications. It is purposive to enable companies to understand the advantages of microservice architectures, including scalability, seamless maintenance, resilience, and improved time to market, with enhanced effectiveness and reduced disruption to legacy applications and services.
Unless one rationalizes those monolithic apps to be cloud-native, they need expensive and bigger machines and reimburse more to the cloud providers. Enterprises now understand that if they want to avail of the actual benefit of the cloud, modernization or migration to microservices is necessary. Therefore, it begins with obtaining an architecture, which involves microservices, modern design principles, and APIs.
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