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Microservices Architecture and Migration Strategies

5 posts · Aug 2016 – Sep 2022

What this trail covers

GitLab is adopted by organizations to consolidate toolchains, improve version control, ensure accountability, boost collaboration, establish a single source of truth, and speed up production. This includes enabling teams to work in an Agile setting, accelerating the delivery of software while maintaining high quality, and incorporating feedback from all application stakeholders. The platform's integrated approach reduces the need for multiple tools, streamlines workflows, and enables organizations to manage microservices architectures effectively, including independent deployment, diverse technology stacks, and improved system-wide stability. It also addresses the drawbacks of microservices such as increased latency, debugging complexity, and infrastructure overhead by providing integrated CI/CD, issue tracking, and group-level management features.

All GitLab trails
  1. What are the benefits of a microservices architecture?This post details the advantages and disadvantages of microservices architecture. Advantages include scalability improvements, improved fault isolation, program language and technology agnosticism, simpler deployment, reusability across different areas of business, faster time-to-market, ability to experiment, improved data security, outsourcing flexibility, team optimization, and attractiveness for engineers. Disadvantages include higher upfront costs, crucial interface control, a different kind of complexity, and challenges with integration testing. It also briefly contrasts microservices with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
  2. Get started with microservices architectureThis post introduces how to start building with microservices architecture by identifying decomposable aspects of the application, determining key metrics to monitor (CPU, memory, API response time, error rate), and outlining best practices for deployment and management. Best practices include infrastructure automation for managing growing numbers of microservices and implementing consumer-driven contract tests to ensure API version compatibility. It also emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring of key metrics and the alignment of microservices architecture with DevOps principles for faster feedback loops and reduced time to market.
  3. From monolith to microservices: How to leverage AWS with GitLabThis post details Ask Media Group's transition from a monolithic system to a microservices architecture using GitLab and AWS. Key technical aspects include leveraging GitLab for image building and container orchestration on Kubernetes, enabling independent development and deployment of services, and utilizing AWS for auto-scaling. The article highlights GitLab as a command and control interface for Kubernetes clusters running on EC2 instances, emphasizing the platform's completeness and maturity for building on AWS.
  4. How to manage Agile teams with microservicesThis post details how to use GitLab Projects and Groups to organize teams by system, product area, or a hybrid approach to manage Agile development within a microservices architecture. It explains how to leverage Agile artifacts like Milestones, Issues, and Weights within these structures.
  5. Implementing microservices architectures and deployment strategiesThis post introduces and contrasts three strategies for transitioning from monolithic architectures to microservices: the strangler method (gradual replacement), the Lego strategy (building new features as microservices while keeping the monolith), and the nuclear option (a full rip-and-replace). It highlights the benefits and drawbacks of each, emphasizing uptime, speed, and technical debt. The post also outlines key goals for a successful transition, citing Verizon's experience in reducing deployment times, and notes how modern tools like Kubernetes and CI/CD have made microservices more accessible.
  7. Examples of legacy modernisation projectsThis post discusses the benefits of migrating from monolithic architectures to microservices, highlighting how breaking down components into independently deployable services communicating via APIs allows for faster deployment and scaling at a lower cost. It references a webcast where Ask Media Group discussed their transition using containers, Kubernetes, and AWS. The post also touches on improving automation, simplifying toolchains, and reducing release lifecycles as other application modernization strategies.
  8. Verizon cuts datacenter rebuilds from 30 days to 8 hoursThis post details how Verizon Connect migrated from a monolithic, Java-based application architecture to a microservices architecture using GitLab. They achieved a reduction in datacenter rebuilds from 30 days to 8 hours by focusing on architecture, automation, extensibility, and future-proofing. GitLab was chosen as a single solution to replace disparate tools like Jira, BitBucket, and Jenkins, providing integrated code review, CI/CD, issue tracking, source code management, audit management, and ChatOps capabilities. This enabled them to achieve deployment flexibility, platform agnosticism, streamlined processes, and focus developers on differentiating tasks.
  9. Tackling the microservices repository explosion challengeThis post discusses the challenge of managing an increasing number of microservice repositories and the need for an integrated solution. It highlights GitLab's vision of providing all necessary tools out-of-the-box to streamline the DevOps lifecycle for microservices. It also mentions upcoming features like group-level Kubernetes clusters, a global Docker registry browser, and defining multiple pipelines, building upon existing multi-project pipeline and Kubernetes support.
  10. Trends in Version Control Land: MicroservicesThis post introduces microservices architecture as a trend, defining it as designing software applications as smaller, independent, cloud-based services. It details the benefits (system-wide stability, scaling teams, diverse technology, improved architecture) and drawbacks (latency, distributed system complexity, three-step rollouts, accommodating failure modes, infrastructure complexity, multiple projects). It then explains how GitLab's integrated platform helps manage microservices by providing pre-configured CI/CD, issue tracking, and group-level management, reducing the need for external integrations and simplifying coordination. The post concludes by suggesting microservices are right for teams spending too much time coordinating, especially with more than 25 backend developers.