In a Kubernetes containerized environment, the following best practices are followed to efficiently migrate from monoliths to microservices.
Translated from 4 Strategies for Migrating Monolithic Apps to Microservices by Kayla Bondy is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Dynatrace, focusing on the Application Observability product line. With over 7 years of experience in technical and marketing roles, she brings passion and expertise to communicating complex technology concepts. DevOps teams are under tremendous pressure to migrate monolithic applications to a distributed containerized architecture using Kubernetes to optimize the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). They're working to shorten release cycles, simplify deployment changes, and reduce vulnerability due to dependencies. These requirements drive the shift from monolithic applications that struggle to keep up with modern demands, as a single change requires a rebuild of the entire stack. According to the Cloud Native Computing** Conference (CNCF) 2022 survey, 79% of organizations have moved to a microservices architecture that makes it easy to iterate on a single service. For many organizations, adopting a lift-and-transform approach is the first step in migrating monolithic applications to Kubernetes and microservices. This involves deploying a monolithic application directly onto hardware hosted on the cloud, and then gradually splitting the application into microservices. However, there are also challenges to lifting and shifting ideas, as organizations must refactor monolithic applications to optimize cloud performance. As a result, it is often more cost-effective to refactor an application to a containerized architecture on a case-by-case basis.
Here are four best practices that DevOps teams can follow to efficiently migrate monolithic applications to microservices in a Kubernetes containerized environment. Monolithic applications are often susceptible to breaking their complex and fragile web of dependencies. As a result, sudden and unexpected outages are almost inevitable when migrating monolithic apps to the cloud and containers without a clear plan—especially if the DevOps team moves forward. To avoid unwanted surprises, fully map the dependencies and business capabilities of a monolithic application before any migration project.
Due to its complexity, there is a high risk of human error in manually mapping dependencies for monolithic applications. Therefore, in order to understand the relationship between the back-end and front-end components of an application, it would be helpful to use an automated solution that can visualize the application in real-time. Using telemetry from transaction traces for application topology mapping is critical to enable teams to build accurate visual representations of monolithic apps and their components.
Refactoring a monolithic application for a containerized Kubernetes environment is a huge undertaking that often involves refactoring and rebuilding from scratch. With this in mind, it's critical to break down the migration effort into smaller, incremental, and more manageable jobs.
After mapping a monolithic app, DevOps teams can gradually replace their components with microservices. When creating a single microservice, teams can test and compare monolithic applications to see how the new service affects performance and functionality. Then, once the microservice has successfully replicated the functionality of the monolithic app, the team can remove the dependencies of that particular component on the monolith and move on to the next component. Dependencies in monolithic applications are deeply intertwined. These close relationships between components are one of the driving forces driving the transition to Kubernetes and microservices, as they hinder flexible change and deployment.
When migrating an application to a microservices architecture, the team needs to understand all the dependencies between the services and minimize and simplify those dependencies as much as possible. Asynchronous messaging is critical because it allows services to communicate by using queues to send and receive messages. By adopting asynchronous messaging, there will be fewer bottlenecks in communication between microservices, while also making it easier to edit or replace individual microservices.
Migrating from monolithic applications to containerized services on Kubernetes means that applications have more services and supporting technologies that can run independently of each other, which can make them more complex. Given the number of components, it's difficult for DevOps teams to manually track all the dependencies between them. Just as teams need to map monolithic apps before migrating them, they also need to maintain a microservices environment mapping with end-to-end observability.
In practice, this means using observable data, including logs, metrics, and traces from components of the cloud stack, to understand service relationships and application dependencies. This observability must also extend to every Kubernetes cluster, node, and pod and the workloads running on it. When a problem arises, observable data allows DevOps teams to identify the root cause of the problem so they can resolve it quickly. To be more effective, teams should use a platform that unifies observability and security data from across the application infrastructure. This unified platform should leverage AI capabilities to provide precise answers to the health of the environment so that teams can automate much of the work around fault triage, interpretation, and remediation.
Migrating from monolithic applications to containerized microservices can be complex and time-consuming. However, once the migration is complete, DevOps teams can be more agile to iterate while being able to take full advantage of cloud services.
Much of the work that the team accomplishes to achieve the migration will pay off in the long run. Adopting modern technologies, such as end-to-end observability and AI, to facilitate migration enables teams to continuously monitor and optimize their microservices environment to deliver the best user experience and business outcomes. These technologies can inspire their transformation efforts and help organizations gain a lasting competitive advantage.