Migrate monolithic applications to micro-services platform on AWS

As cloud becomes the new normal, many businesses want to use its potential to improve their customer experience. Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps businesses migrate to the cloud and provides best practices for the modernization of their applications. Organizations all around the world are using the breadth and depth of AWS services to become more cloud native.

Monolithic architecture is a traditional way of building applications. A monolithic application is built as a single and indivisible unit. Usually, such a solution comprises a client-side user interface, a server side-application, and a database. It is unified, and all the functions are managed and served in one place.

A microservices architecture, also simply known as microservices, is an architectural method that relies on a series of independently deployable services. These services have their own business logic and database with a specific goal. Updating, testing, deployment, and scaling occur within each
service. Microservices decouple major business, domain-specific concerns into separate, independent code bases. Microservices don’t reduce complexity, but they make any complexity visible and more manageable by separating tasks into smaller processes that function independently of each other and contribute to the overall whole.

While a monolithic application is a single unified unit, a microservices architecture breaks it down into a collection of smaller independent units. These units carry out every application process as a separate service. So, all the services have their own logic and databases, as well as perform specific
functions.

Challenges in monolithic application architecture

Large, monolithic application with reliability and performance issues.

• Increased application complexity
• More downtime due to the increase in maintenance cycles.
• Inter-service communication and persistent data across services
• Dependency on costly, third-party licensed applications.
• Health monitoring and debugging become difficult at scale
• Increased blast radius due to the tightly coupled architecture, where an issue in one component could take down the entire system.
• Tedious manual deployments for new-feature releases.

The benefits of a microservice based architecture

• Agility – Promote agile ways of working with small teams that deploy
  frequently.
• Flexible scaling – If a microservice reaches its load capacity, new instances of that service can rapidly be deployed to the accompanying cluster to help relieve pressure. We are now multi-tenant and stateless with customers spread across multiple instances. Now we can support much larger instance sizes.
• Continuous deployment – We now have frequent and faster release cycles. Before we would push out updates once a week and now, we can do so about two to three times a day.
• Highly maintainable and testable – Teams can experiment with new features and roll back if something doesn’t work. This makes it easier to update code and accelerates time-to-market for new features. Plus, it is easy to isolate and fix faults and bugs in individual services.
• Independently deployable – Since microservices are individual units they allow for fast and easy independent deployment of individual features.
• Technology flexibility – Microservice architectures allow teams the freedom to select the tools they desire.
• High reliability – You can deploy changes for a specific service, without the threat of bringing down the entire application.
• Happier teams – The Atlassian teams who work with microservices are a lot happier, since they are more autonomous and can build and deploy themselves without waiting weeks for a pull request to be approved.

Below are common AWS services which can be used for Microservices implementation

• AWS Lambda
• AWS EC2 Instance or Fargate
• Amazon Elastic Container Service
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
• Identity and Access Management
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry
• AWS Code Pipeline
• AWS RDS, Elastic Cache service

Conclusion

Microservices are an excellent choice for building, running, and updating resilient and highly scalable applications. AWS provides a ton of managed building blocks for handling every aspect of microservices implementation and provides all the tools needed to replace these components with
open-source alternatives — should you have the necessary expertise at hand and be able to manage your infrastructure using an in-house or remote team to maximize the cost-efficiency of operations.

By the way, cloudxchange.io has great experience designing, building, and managing various microservice-based applications for our customers. So, if you need our assistance, just drop us a line. We’re always ready to help!