The Allure and Danger of Microservices
Monolithic applications are easy to build and test initially, but as teams scale, they become bottlenecked. Code changes conflict, deployments become risky, and the system becomes difficult to understand. However, migrating to microservices prematurely can lead to a distributed mess. Migration must be planned carefully.
The Strangler Fig Pattern
Rather than doing a risky “big bang” rewrite, the industry standard is the Strangler Fig Pattern. This involves replacing monolithic features with microservices gradually. An API gateway routes old endpoints to the monolith and new/migrated endpoints to the new microservice until the monolith is completely replaced.