Monolith Decomposition Patterns

GOTO Berlin 2019

Big Bang rebuilds of systems are so 20th century. With our users expecting new functionality to be shipped more frequently than ever before, we no longer have the luxury of a complete system rebuild. In fact, a big bang migration of a monolithic architecture into a microservice architecture can be especially problematic, as we’ll explore in this talk.

We want to ship features, but we also want to improve our architecture, and for many of us this means breaking down existing systems into microservices. But how do you do this while still regularly releasing new features?

In this talk, I’ll share with you some key principles and a number of patterns which you can use to incrementally decompose an existing system into microservices. I’ll also cover off patterns that can work to migrate functionality out of systems you can’t change, which are useful when working with very old systems or vendor products. We'll look at the use of strangler patterns, change data capture, database decomposition and more.