Migrating to Cloud-Native Application Architectures

Chapter 3. Migration Cookbook

Now that we’ve defined cloud-native application architectures and given a brief high-level overview of the changes enterprises must consider when adopting them, it’s time to delve into technical specifics. Each of these topics minimally merits its own chapter, and that’s beyond the scope of this report. Instead, this chapter provides a set of short, cookbook-style recipes to help with specific tasks and patterns needed to adopt a cloud-native application architecture, along with links to helpful further reading.

Decomposition Recipes

After discussing the decomposition of data, services, and teams with customers, I’m often asked, “Great! How do we get there from here?” Good question. How do we tear apart existing monoliths and move them to the cloud?

As it turns out, I’ve seen companies succeed with a fairly repeatable pattern of incremental migration which I now recommend to all of my customers. Publicly referenceable examples of this pattern can be found at SoundCloud and Karma.

In this section we’ll walk step-by-step through a series of recipes that provide a process for decomposing monolithic services and moving them to the cloud.

New Features as Microservices

Surprisingly, the first step is not to start chipping away at the monolith itself. We’ll begin with the assumption that you still have a backlog of features to be built within the monolith. In fact, if you don’t have any net new functionality to build, it’s arguable that you shouldn’t even ...