One Journey, many Paths: A Pragmatic Guide for Migrating to Microservices

GOTO Chicago 2017

Do you want to migrate your existing systems to a microservices ecosystem? If so, this talk is for you.

Whether your organization is a large enterprise with legacy systems; or whether your organization is a growing startup with a proven business model based on a monolith; or somewhere in between, you are here because you have decided that migrating towards a microservices ecosystem will liberate you from the constraints of your existing architecture.

The experience shows that navigating this journey is challenging. Each organization has its distinct culture, constraints and state of architecture that demands its own unique path of migration.

In this talk I offer you an essential set of pragmatic guides. I have distilled these guides from the lessons I’ve learned making the journey to microservices in different domains. The experience is drawn from domains such as finance, telecommunication, supply chain and retail.

I will leave you with a collection of:

• patterns and anti-patterns for migrating and decomposing large monoliths that are in-use and alive,
• trade-offs you need to repeatedly evaluate to prioritise your next steps,
• founding principles that support the hard decisions you need to make, and
• a sample roadmap for an organizational-wide migration.

This synthesis will help you build and execute a migration strategy unique to your needs.