Transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices is more than just a software engineering trend—it’s a strategic move to achieve greater flexibility, scalability, and resilience. As businesses grow and their systems become more complex, the limitations of monolithic structures can become bottlenecks for innovation. This is where monolith to microservices migration comes into play, offering a way to break down large, tightly coupled systems into smaller, independently managed services. But how do you know if this shift is right for your business? And what are the best practices to ensure a successful migration? In this guide for migration to microservices, we’ll explore everything you need to know about migrating from monolithic systems to microservices, from assessing their value to implementing a smooth transition.
When is monolith to microservices migration worth it?
Deciding whether to migrate from a monolithic architecture to microservices requires careful consideration of several factors, particularly the complexity and scalability of your business domain. Migration tends to be most advantageous when the business environment demands greater flexibility and efficiency. Here are three key situations where monolithic to microservices migration can provide significant value:
1. Complex domains: Businesses operating in complex domains, such as supply chain or banking, often deal with systems that can be logically divided into smaller subdomains. In such cases, migration allows you to break down large systems into more manageable microservices. For example, separating a supply chain monolith into microservices for inventory, procurement, and shipping can lead to more efficient operations and easier scaling.
2. Critical transactions: High-transaction industries, such as banking with payments or manufacturing with transactions, require scalable and resilient systems. Migrating critical services to microservices ensures that these vital parts of the business can perform reliably under heavy loads, optimizing overall performance and reducing downtime risks.
3. Frequent updates and scaling needs: If your system requires frequent updates or you anticipate significant growth, microservices can offer more flexibility than a monolithic structure. For example, in ecommerce, features like customer management, order processing, and inventory control need regular updates and scaling to handle fluctuating traffic. Migrating to microservices in such case allows each component to be updated, scaled, or maintained independently without affecting the entire system. This leads to faster deployment cycles, reduced downtime, and improved overall agility. It can look as follows:
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Key steps to success in monolith to microservices migration
1. Understand the monolith
Before starting the migration process, it is essential to understand the architecture of your existing monolithic system thoroughly. This involves identifying all the components, their dependencies, and how they interact.
It is a good idea to partner with a tech vendor to conduct a detailed analysis of your codebase to pinpoint critical areas such as performance bottlenecks, frequent failures, or modules that are difficult to scale.
Understanding the business logic is equally important, as this will help determine how best to break the system down into microservices. For instance, a manufacturing system might have modules like production planning, supply management, and order tracking. By analyzing these components, it gets easier to identify the best candidates for refactoring into microservices and ensure a smooth transition without disrupting core business functions.
2. Find what to refactor
Not all parts of a monolithic system need to be migrated to microservices at once. The key to a successful migration is identifying which components or modules would benefit the most from refactoring first. Start by looking for highly cohesive components that have well-defined boundaries and perform distinct business functions. These are the easiest to break off into independent microservices.
For example, in a banking system, the payment processing module is often a good candidate for refactoring. It’s a critical, high-transaction component that typically requires greater scalability and resilience, making it ideal for migration. Similarly, in a supply chain system, components like inventory management or procurement could be extracted as microservices.
Additionally, consider refactoring areas where you frequently experience bottlenecks, performance issues or require frequent updates. Prioritize services that will benefit most from independent scaling or quicker deployment, ensuring that the migration aligns with the immediate needs of your business.
3. Refactor incrementally
Attempting to migrate an entire monolithic system to microservices all at once can lead to significant disruptions and complications. Instead, adopt an incremental approach by refactoring and migrating one component at a time. This ensures that the migration process is manageable and reduces the risk of failure, allowing you to quickly address any issues that arise with individual services without affecting the entire system.
Begin by extracting non-critical or less complex components first to test the process and build confidence. For example, in a facility management system, you might start by refactoring a smaller, non-essential module, like report generation. This allows your team to refine the migration process and tools before tackling more critical components.
By refactoring incrementally, you can also ensure that each newly created microservice integrates smoothly with the remaining monolithic system. This approach allows for continuous improvements and enables your team to monitor the performance of individual services, making adjustments as needed. It’s also easier to manage dependencies between services when you’re handling the migration in smaller, more controlled steps.
4. Choose the right technology for each microservice
One of the advantages of a microservices architecture is the ability to select the best technology stack for each service based on its specific needs and requirements. Unlike monolithic systems, where you're often locked into a single technology, microservices allow for polyglot programming—using different technologies for different services, which can optimize performance, scalability, and maintainability.
When selecting the right technology, consider the following:
- Business readiness: Asses business readiness to handle multiple technologies within one platform, as it is usually a high investment in the future maintenance of the solution. Still, with microservices, this option could be leveraged in the hing constrained with non-functional requirements products.
- Business requirements: Ensure the chosen technology aligns with the business logic of the microservice. For example, in a manufacturing system, a microservice handling real-time production monitoring might benefit from a tech stack optimized for high-throughput, real-time processing, such as Node.js or Go.
- Service-specific needs: For example, a banking microservice for payment processing may need a high level of security and transactional integrity, making Java or C with strong transactional frameworks a good choice. On the other hand, a data-heavy analytics service might perform better with Python due to its rich Data Science libraries.
- Performance and scalability: Choose technology that matches the expected load and performance requirements of each microservice. If your service requires low latency and fast processing, like a real-time facility management dashboard, you might opt for lightweight, high-performance languages like Go or Rust.
- Team expertise: Leverage the expertise of your development team to ensure they can manage and maintain the chosen technology. Introducing a new language or framework might require additional training, so it’s important to balance technological fit with team capabilities.
Related: How to find the best microservices developers
5. Monitor the application before, during, and after migration
Effective monitoring is essential at every stage of the monolithic to microservices migration process. By tracking performance metrics before, during, and after the migration, you can ensure that the migration is successful, minimize potential issues, and optimize the performance of each newly created microservice.
Before migration: Start by setting up monitoring for the monolithic system to identify baseline performance metrics such as response times, error rates, and resource usage. This will help you understand the current state of the system and pinpoint areas that need improvement. For instance, in a banking system, you might monitor transaction processing times to identify bottlenecks in payment processing or customer data retrieval.
During migration: As you migrate individual components to microservices, it’s important to continuously monitor both the new microservices and the remaining parts of the monolith. This allows you to identify issues early, such as latency in communication between microservices or any unexpected behavior in the newly refactored services. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog and many others can help track microservice performance, uptime, and error rates in real-time.
After migration: Once the migration is complete, ongoing monitoring is essential to ensure the microservices architecture is functioning as expected. You'll need to track the performance of each microservice individually, as well as their interaction with one another, to ensure the overall system remains stable. Additionally, monitoring tools can help identify areas where further optimization is needed, such as scaling services to handle increasing traffic in high-demand modules like inventory management in a manufacturing system.
6. Align the microservices with your business logic
A successful monolith to microservices migration isn’t just about breaking down a large system into smaller parts—it’s about ensuring that each microservice serves a clear purpose aligned with your business logic. Each microservice should encapsulate a distinct business capability, allowing for easier management and scaling while also supporting the overall goals of your business.
Map microservices to business domains
Begin by mapping your microservices to specific business domains or functions. For example, in a supply chain management system, you might create separate microservices for inventory, procurement, and order processing. This ensures that each service reflects a core business capability, making it easier to manage and evolve independently as the business grows.
Single-out business-critical services
Identify critical areas of your business that require heightened focus during migration. For instance, in a banking application, the payment processing service is likely a critical component that must remain highly reliable and secure. These core services should be carefully designed, monitored, and scaled according to business needs, ensuring they meet specific performance and security requirements.
Orchestrate microservices with business processes
The interaction between microservices should mimic how processes work in your business. For example, a facility management system might involve different services for maintenance requests, billing, and tenant management. These services need to communicate seamlessly, reflecting how those processes work together in real life. You’ll also need to decide on the communication approach: for real-time processes, a synchronous approach like REST might be best. On the other hand, background tasks or batch processing might work better with asynchronous messaging using gRPC or event-driven patterns.
Find the optimal communication approach
Ensure that each microservice aligns with its specific functional requirements. For instance, services with time-sensitive data may need real-time communication, whereas others may work with delayed responses. Tools like Camunda can help manage and orchestrate business processes, ensuring that each service functions as part of a larger whole. The orchestration of microservices—whether through REST, gRPC, or message queues—should be dictated by the communication needs of your business logic. Additionally, think about resiliency; the more services you decompose, the more potential failure points, so plan for fault tolerance and graceful degradation.
Once these foundational elements are in place, it’s time to select the right migration approach. Choosing the appropriate monolith to microservices migration pattern is essential for a smooth and successful transition. Below are some of the most effective monolith to microservices migration patterns that align with different business needs and challenges.
Monolith to microservices migration patterns
There are several established patterns for migrating from monolithic to microservices architectures. A trusted tech partner will guide you through this transformation, ensuring that your business logic, critical services, and operational goals are aligned with your software architecture. For instance, N-iX Solution Group offers consulting services tailored to identify the best approach and patterns based on your unique business needs, reducing risks and ensuring a smooth transition. So, what patterns are there?
1. Strangler fig pattern
This pattern is one of the most commonly used for monolith to microservices migration. It involves building a new system around the existing monolith, gradually replacing it piece by piece with microservices. Over time, the monolithic components are "strangled" and phased out, reducing the risk of disrupting core functionality. This pattern is ideal for businesses with critical operations that need to remain functional during the migration, such as manufacturing systems handling production lines or banking applications processing payments. At N-iX, our Solution Group helps enterprises implement the strangler fig pattern, ensuring a step-by-step migration that minimizes downtime and operational risk.
2. Database-per-service pattern
In this approach, each microservice manages its own database, reducing dependencies between services. While this promotes autonomy and scalability, it requires more sophisticated data management and careful handling of data consistency across services. For example, in supply chain management, where inventory, procurement, and shipping are distinct services, each could maintain its own database. This approach prevents data bottlenecks and improves performance but requires careful coordination to ensure accurate and consistent data flows. N-iX’s consulting services provide in-depth guidance on managing data in a distributed microservices environment, helping businesses set up appropriate data replication and synchronization strategies.
3. Event-driven architecture
This pattern is based on microservices communicating with each other through events, allowing for loose coupling and asynchronous processing. It is beneficial in systems where immediate responses are not always required, such as background tasks or processes that don’t need real-time interaction, are not always required. For example, in a facility management system, triggering maintenance tasks based on sensor data can be managed asynchronously using an event-driven architecture. N-iX brings expertise in implementing event-driven architectures using technologies like Kafka, ensuring robust, scalable communication between services.
4. API gateway pattern
An API gateway acts as the central entry point for all client requests, routing them to the appropriate microservices. It simplifies communication between clients and services and can handle tasks like load balancing, authentication, and rate limiting. This pattern is ideal for large-scale systems where multiple microservices must work together to fulfill client requests, such as banking platforms or ecommerce systems. N-iX specializes in designing and implementing API gateways tailored to your system’s specific needs, ensuring secure and efficient communication between services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, migrating from a monolith to microservices offers significant long-term benefits, but requires careful planning and execution. By understanding the structure of your existing monolith, refactoring incrementally, and aligning your services with business logic, you can unlock the full potential of microservices architecture.
Why migrate to microservices with N-iX?
At N-iX, we offer comprehensive consulting services to guide businesses through every stage of their monolith to microservices migration journey. With over 21 years of market experience and more than 2,200 skilled IT professionals, we are a trusted partner for enterprises across industries. Our Solution Group, led by seasoned professionals, thoroughly analyzes your existing architecture, business processes, and future goals to design a monolithic to microservices migration strategy that perfectly aligns with your needs.
Our approach is built around three key pillars:
- Domain-driven design: We help businesses break down complex systems into manageable microservices, each representing distinct business capabilities. This ensures that your architecture reflects the unique demands of your domain, whether it’s banking, manufacturing, supply chain, or beyond.
- Technology expertise: Our team of experts excels in cutting-edge technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, and others. Combined with our extensive knowledge in cloud, DevOps, and data analytics, we create microservices architectures that are scalable, secure, and built to last. We have partnerships with top cloud providers which brings leverage to use the benefits of such operations, especially during such transformations. We have over 400 cloud specialists who can assist with cloud-native solutions, cloud migration, and CI/CD process optimization.
- End-to-end support: We provide full lifecycle consulting, from initial assessment to post-migration support. Whether you’re looking to adopt event-driven architectures, implement API gateways, or refine your database-per-service strategies, our experts deliver tailored solutions. We also ensure that your systems comply with international standards, including ISO 27001:2013, PCI DSS, ISO 9001:2015, and GDPR.
With our strong engineering and architecture community—we have helped businesses across diverse sectors such as fintech, telecommunications, healthcare, and education adopt scalable, efficient microservices architectures. Our expertise has been recognized globally, with N-iX repeatedly featured in CRN’s Solution Provider 500 and CRN Fast Growth 150 lists.
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