Legacy App Migration Blog 2: Your Friendly Neighborhood Microservice – Migrating legacy apps and driving down the development effort with REAN Cloud’s platform

To accommodate the increasing complexity of functional requirements, IT applications have embraced a variety of architectural patterns. Organizations must meet ever-changing business demands — from mainframe applications and client-server to service oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices.

Despite technological advancements, 90 percent of business IT applications are legacy and what are known as “monolithic”. These range from mainframe apps where UI, business logic and data storage reside on machines, to client-server apps where layered technologies that support UI, business functionality, and data are stored horizontally. Microservices architecture, on the other hand, divides the functionality into cohesive verticals by implementing a specific domain.

Microservices architecture is a combination of successful and proven concepts of software engineering such as agile software development, SOA, API-first design and continuous delivery (CD). This architecture and organizational approach to software development is designed to accelerate development cycles, foster innovation and ownership, and improve the ability to maintain and scale applications.

Maintaining monolithic applications often proves challenging because it’s difficult to test and release millions of lines of code for tiny changes (in most cases only a few lines). Thankfully, current cloud-based distributed technologies alleviate the burden of managing monolithic applications by providing a platform to develop and deploy on a dime.

But migrating to microservices is not a as simple as it sounds. It requires a big change management process that often includes new team structures (to say nothing of altering the mindset of the organization!). To support the approach, technology stacks must also be upgraded. In the microservices scheme, an application is built with a modular approach, making it scalable and easier to deploy. With the right tools, governance and automation in place, updates come much easier.

REAN Cloud, a trusted partner with experience migrating monolithic applications to cloud and microservices architecture, can help make the process seamless. Let us help you make the shift so you can capitalize on business opportunities faster.

Key Benefits of Microservices

• Development Agility
• Streamline feature development: Sprint faster to keep up with changing needs
• Increase innovation: Reorganize into domain specific, end-to-end service teams
• Operational Excellence
• Minimize downtime: Perform isolated maintenance
• Achieve high quality: Continuously and confidently develop and test
• Optimize scalability: React fluidly with smaller, self-contained components
• Platform Reusability
• Increase reuse and decrease overhead: Encourage sharing on API-driven architecture
• Enable business consumption: Solve small problems with measurable outcomes
• Containerization
• Simplify Containerization: Microservices are easier to containerize than larger apps
• Maximize resource utilization: Utilize containers for efficient infrastructure consumption
• Avoid tool / expertise lock-in: Choose the best technique / technology for the specific problem
• External Adoption
• Adopt existing third-party tools: Integrate easily into API-driven ecosystems
• Grow user base / expand market: Extend capabilities to external parties

REAN Cloud has a flexible and effective way of migrating monolithic applications to microservices, which includes the following steps:

• Application Assessment
• Meet with the application SMEs to gather detailed information about the application, including:
• Application functionality
• Technology stack
• Data-structure
• Interfaces
• Existing pain points
• Provide modernization options
• Based on the REAN Cloud recommendations, provide proposed LOE (Level of Effort)
• After mutual agreement, REAN Cloud begins with agile methodology, including:
• Create a project plan and share with all the stakeholders
• Get a deep understanding of the functionality of the existing application
• Split the application into smaller domains
• Define the boundaries of the domains and microservices
• Finalize the technology stack
• Generate infrastructure blueprints
• Set up the foundation environment
• Put continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines in place
• Begin development sprints (REAN Cloud prefers test-driven development to minimize manual testing)

REAN Cloud is committed to working with its customers to meet almost any need:

• Adapt agile development methodology, essential for developing microservices
• Foster small, independent teams within the organization to take over ownership of the services
• Streamline communications to ensure success
• Embrace CI best practices and automate CI/CD processes

With REAN Cloud’s platform, companies can take advantage of an API-driven cloud architecture and get moving faster.

In the next post, we’ll discuss the benefits and use of data lakes as a foundation for your applications and innovation.