When migrating a Monolithic to Microservices, there are much more than technical challenges. First and not least, is the resistance to the change. Indeed, moving to microservices is a big paradigm change that requires changes in the company culture.  Don’t underestimate the resistance of your colleague architects that have been working on your monolith that you are planning to decompose.

Listen and understand their concerns as some are legitimate and maybe real challenges to your transformation. Probably some of these concerns will be related to splitting the schema, the granularity of the services you are proposing, and all the complexity that microservices will bring.

Make sure to understand and explain clearly to your team what goals you want to achieve by adopting a microservice architecture. Once goals are clear for everyone, you are bringing the infinite discussions you’re having with your team about the WHY of the migration to another level more challenging and interesting which is HOW to achieve this transformation of your large monolith to smaller microservices.

During this journey, you need to find common ground and tackle the complexity step by step. Start with one bounded context at a time and don’t try to split the big schema into several schemas from the first day. Do it incrementally and learn from each step to improve the decomposition process.

Keep in mind that microservices are not a magic bullet solution to all your problems. There are many situations where the monolith is a much better option.

About the Author

My name is Adel Ghlamallah and I’m an architect and a java developer.

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