How To Seamlessly Migrate from Monolith to Microservices in E-Commerce?
Carlos Oliveira
Is your e-commerce platform starting to resemble a Rube Goldberg machine where minor issues bring about catastrophic consequences? Transitioning from monolithic to microservices will streamline operations, boost performance, and help you achieve business goals.
This blog offers a concise overview of the migration process, featuring expert insights and industry case studies. We aim to equip you with the strategies and best practices needed for a smooth transition.
How Can Architecture Solve Common E-Commerce Challenges?
Imagine your e-commerce platform as a bustling marketplace filled with vendors and shoppers. High traffic means high income, but it also brings high risk. The more people flood the market, the greater the potential for problems.
In a monolithic system, it’s like shutting down the entire market if one vendor stall breaks down or the crumbly pavement slows down customers.
This single point of failure can lead to major disruptions, hindering the delivery of a seamless shopping experience and impacting your bottom line.
Key Insights on Relocating from Monolith to Microservices
Some market signals that illustrate our discussion:
- Errors are costly. When encountering an error, 75% of customers reported they would leave without completing the transaction, and 60% said they would probably not return to the website (source).
- Customers don’t wait. A site that loads in 1 second has an e-commerce conversion rate 2.5x higher than one that loads in 5 seconds (source).
- Google likes performance. Websites with better performance rank higher on Google results, as confirmed by the search giant (source).
- Direct business impact. Walmart stated that an improvement of 100ms in loading time could increase revenue by up to 1%, and that way back in 2012 when the competition was easier (source).
In conversations with store owners, they often highlight how slow-loading pages and downtimes directly impact customer conversions, significantly affecting their bottom line. This poor performance becomes critical during peak shopping seasons, necessitating an expensive cycle of hotfixes to maintain a seamless shopping experience.
Tomasz Ludward, Account Executive at Mirumee
Understanding the Shift from Monolith to Microservices
Monolith, headless, and microservices are software architecture models. Software architecture defines how each part of the system integrates and communicates with others.
These are models; in reality, systems don’t always fit 100% into one box. However, studying each approach highlights the benefits and risks it carries toward business capabilities.
What Is Monolithic Architecture and What Does It Mean?
Monolithic architecture is a traditional software design paradigm that bundles all functionalities into a single, cohesive unit. This single-tiered approach means that every part of the application is tightly coupled and runs as a whole.
For e-commerce platforms, this might involve one bloated codebase with the user interface, business logic, and data access layers.
While monolithic architectures can simplify initial development and deployment, they have significant drawbacks as the system scales. Any change or update necessitates redeploying the entire application, increasing the risk of introducing bugs and causing downtime. Scaling a monolithic application often means duplicating the whole system, which can be inefficient and costly.
What Is Microservices Architecture and How Does It Differ from Monolithic?
Microservices architecture is a design approach where an application is structured as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services. Each service corresponds to a specific business function and operates in isolation from the others – for example, storefront, customer database, checkout, etc.
This modularity allows teams to develop, deploy, and scale services independently, fostering a more agile and responsive development process.
Unlike monolithic architecture, where a single change can ripple through the entire system, microservices contain changes within individual services, reducing risk and downtime. This architecture supports continuous delivery and integration, enabling e-commerce platforms to adopt a more iterative and flexible development cycle.
Additionally, microservices can be developed using different technologies best suited for each service, providing greater flexibility and innovation potential.
Note from System Architect
We can think microservices as breaking a big task into smaller, easier tasks that can be handled by different people. Each small task can be improved without affecting the others, increasing efficiency. In contrast, a monolithic approach is like trying to do everything in one go, which can get confusing and hard to manage.
Disadvantages of the Monolith Architecture
Despite its simplicity, monolithic architecture has several notable disadvantages. One of the primary issues is scalability. As your e-commerce platform grows, scaling a monolithic application often requires duplicating the entire system, which is resource-intensive and inefficient. It can lead to higher costs and increased complexity in managing the infrastructure.
Moreover, monolithic systems suffer from a lack of agility. Any change, no matter how minor, necessitates a full redeployment of the application. It increases the risk of introducing bugs and can lead to significant downtime, disrupting the customer experience.
The tightly coupled nature of monolithic architecture also makes it challenging to adopt new technologies, as changes in one part of the system can have unforeseen impacts on others, slowing down innovation and development cycles.
What about Headless?
While we focus on the transition from monolith to microservices, it’s interesting to mention headless since it’s often mentioned when discussing modernizing e-commerce.
Headless is also an architecture – it covers decoupling the front-end (presentation layer) from the back-end (content and services). In a headless system, the back-end delivers content and functionality via APIs, allowing developers to use various front-end technologies to present the data as needed.
Microservices focus on modularizing the back-end services, while headless architecture concentrates on separating the front-end from the back-end. Microservices and headless can work together but are different concepts.
Why Do Some Companies Still Insist on Monoliths?
Credit where credit is due: the microservices architecture is not a silver bullet, and there are cases where using monolithic apps makes business sense.
For smaller e-commerce operations or those in the early stages of development, a monolithic app can be easier to implement and manage, requiring less initial investment in infrastructure and skills.
Even big corporations may have specific use cases that are better handled by monolithic applications. Case in point, Prime Video, Amazon’s video content branch, pivoted from microservices to a monolith in 2023. They explain the process in a thorough blog, where they sum up: “Microservices and serverless components are tools that do work at high scale, but whether to use them over monolith has to be made on a case-by-case basis.”
Finally, the transition to microservices can seem risky and resource-intensive for established businesses with legacy systems. The perceived stability of a well-understood monolithic system can temporarily outweigh the potential benefits of adopting a microservices architecture. That changes, however, when we consider pressures from the market and customers, as we are discussing.
Top 5 Benefits of Microservices for E-Commerce
Microservices architecture can provide several critical benefits for e-commerce platforms:
- Scalability - each microservice can be scaled independently based on demand, ensuring optimal performance without unnecessary resource usage.
- Flexibility - teams can choose the best technologies for each service, fostering innovation and adaptability.
- Resilience - faults are isolated to individual services, reducing the risk of widespread system failures and improving overall reliability.
- Agility - microservices support continuous integration and delivery, enabling rapid deployment of new features and updates with minimal disruption.
- Maintainability - smaller, focused codebases are easier to manage, test, and debug, leading to more efficient development and maintenance processes.
A Monolith to Microservices Story: Rough Trade
Rough Trade wanted to bring their exceptional in-store experience to their online platform but faced limitations with their system's scalability and capacity to handle high traffic, especially during peak times like their Albums of the Year launch.
With Mirumee as an e-commerce replatforming partner, they developed a flexible, scalable platform using commerce and headless solutions. This new online store offers personalized music discovery and seamless tool integrations, transforming it into a space where users enjoy browsing, listening to music, and shopping.
“The flexibility of the composable architecture allows us to easily add or remove features as we need them, without any hassle. The entire process of replatforming our e-commerce was smooth and painless, thanks to the expertise of the Mirumee team”, says Lawrence Montgomery, Managing Director at Rough Trade.
Common Strategies to Relocate from Monolith to Microservices
With all the theory out, let’s discuss essential steps and considerations for transforming your monolithic e-commerce platform into a microservices architecture, enhancing scalability, performance, and resilience.
While every e-commerce is unique, there are proven strategies for migrating systems from a monolithic to a microservices architecture, including incremental, big bang, and strangler patterns.
Strangler Patterns
The strangler pattern is a gradual migration approach where parts of the monolithic app are systematically replaced with microservices. The old monolithic architecture is "strangled" over time by introducing new functionality and services incrementally.
This method minimizes disruption to the overall system, allowing for a smoother transition to microservices while maintaining operational stability.
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is a strategic approach that emphasizes organizing a system around business domains. DDD enables a more modular and scalable architecture by identifying and isolating distinct business functions into separate services.
This alignment with business goals ensures that microservices are purpose-built to serve specific business needs efficiently, enhancing agility and maintainability in the long term.
Parallel Adoption
Parallel adoption involves running the monolithic and microservices architectures concurrently during migration. This strategy allows for thorough testing and validation of microservices while the monolithic system continues to handle production traffic.
By validating each microservice independently and ensuring interoperability with existing systems, parallel adoption mitigates the risk of downtime and operational disruption, ensuring a seamless transition to the new architecture.
How to Plan and Execute the Migration Process Effectively?
Now that you are seriously considering migrating, these tips can be helpful across the whole process.
- Assess and Plan - conduct a thorough assessment of your current system, identifying areas that would benefit most from microservices. Develop a detailed migration plan, including timelines, resources, and key milestones.
- Start Small - begin with less critical services to minimize risk and build experience. Gradually expand to more critical areas as your team gains confidence and expertise.
- Automate Testing and Deployment - implement automated testing and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure smooth and consistent deployments.
- Invest in Monitoring and Logging - robust monitoring and logging are essential for tracking performance, identifying issues, and ensuring system health during and after the transition.
Note from Senior Developer
Effective planning for a migration involves creating a detailed inventory of assets, understanding data flows, and mapping out dependencies to anticipate challenges. With this solid foundation, the process becomes smooth and scalable
When Is the Right Time to Migrate from Monolith to Microservices?
Opportunity cost is often a concern while researching a migration: won’t the business lose momentum by focusing on planning while the competition grows?
With good planning, no. The transition can tackle technical debt without hurting sales quotas.
Implementing agile auditing practices, focusing on high-risk areas, and leveraging technology for automation can speed up the planning phase without compromising the foundations.
Possible Disruptions When Migrating Monolithic Apps and How to Handle Them
Some blockers are sure to appear on the way. But it’s all about being prepared (and, for extra safety, relying on a replatforming partner with a proven track). Here are some potential disruptions that may arise during migration.
- Downtime - service interruptions during migration can impact customer experience and sales.
- Data Consistency - ensuring data consistency across services during the transition can be challenging.
- Integration Issues - Integrating microservices with legacy systems and third-party services can introduce complexity and potential failures.
How to Minimize Disruptions and Ensure Operational Continuity?
Note from Project Manager
During the transition from monolith to microservices with e-commerce clients, our primary focus is to minimize disruptions and ensure uninterrupted operations. Often the end customers don’t notice the changes ‘under the hood,’ which we consider a success!"
Incremental Rollouts
Avoid tackling the entire application in phase one. Implement microservices incrementally, starting with non-critical functions to minimize the impact of potential issues.
For example, maintain two identical environments (the so-called blue and green) where the green environment hosts the new microservices. Once tested and verified, traffic is switched from blue to green seamlessly.
Blue-Green Deployments
Use blue-green deployment strategies to ensure smooth transitions by running parallel environments and switching traffic only when verifying the new environment.
For example, maintain two identical environments (the so-called blue and green) where the green environment hosts the new microservices. Once tested and verified, traffic is switched from blue to green seamlessly.
Data Synchronization
Use robust data synchronization mechanisms to ensure consistency between the monolithic system and microservices during the migration.
For example, implement techniques like change data capture (CDC) to monitor and replicate changes from the monolithic database to the microservices databases in real-time, ensuring both systems remain in sync.
Comprehensive Testing
Conduct thorough testing at every migration stage to identify and resolve issues before they impact the entire application’s production environment.
For example, perform unit tests on individual microservices, integration tests to check communication between services, and end-to-end tests to simulate real user scenarios, ensuring the entire system works cohesively.
Checklist thorough Testing, Monitoring, and Contingency Planning
Before we wrap up, here’s a handy checklist to ensure a smooth transition for your monolithic applications.
Testing:
- Unit tests for individual microservices
- Integration tests for interactions between services
- End-to-end tests for overall system functionality
- Load and performance tests to ensure scalability
Monitoring:
- Real-time monitoring of microservices performance
- Alerting systems for immediate issue detection
- Logging mechanisms for tracking service interactions and errors
Contingency Planning:
- Rollback plans for quick recovery in case of failures
- Backup and restore processes for data integrity
- Disaster recovery strategies to maintain service availability
Monolith to Microservices Migration Boosts E-Commerce Efficiency
It goes without saying that a well-planned migration strategy is crucial for a successful transition away from the cons of the monolithic applications.
By implementing incremental rollouts, using blue-green deployments, ensuring robust data synchronization, and conducting comprehensive testing, you can minimize disruptions and ensure continuity in operations.
These steps will help your e-commerce platform achieve greater scalability, resilience, and performance, enhancing the user experience.
FAQ
What is an example of monolithic? What is a typical monolithic application
A monolithic application is an e-commerce platform where all functions—user interface, product catalog, shopping cart, and payment processing—are integrated into a single codebase. This setup often makes scaling and updating the application challenging.
MVPs and PoCs often use monolithic architectures to maximize time-to-market while sacrificing scalability.
How to convert monolithic to microservices?
To convert a monolithic application to a microservice architecture:
- Assess and plan by identifying components and dependencies.
- Break down the application into smaller services.
- Build and deploy each service independently as microservices.
- Manage communication between services by implementing API gateways.
- Maintain and optimize the multiple services with the development team.
What is the migration strategy from monolith architecture to microservices?
Common migration strategies for microservices include strangler pattern, domain-driven design (DDD), and parallel adoption. They strengthen the migration process, helping helps you achieve tightly integrated independent components that, together, handle business concerns more efficiently.
Why do companies move from monolith to microservices?
Companies use microservices for the following advantages: to improve scalability, flexibility, resilience, and agility, delivering new features faster and with lower cost. Microservices allow for independent development and deployment, making innovating and responding to market changes easier.
What do you need to transition to microservices?
To transition a monolith to microservices, you need:
- A clear microservices migration strategy
- Skilled development teams aware of programmatic development risks
- Automated testing and deployment tools
- Robust monitoring and logging systems
- Effective communication and management strategies
How much does it cost to transition to microservices?
The cost of transitioning to microservices varies widely based on the size and complexity of the existing system, the number of services to be developed, and the resources required for planning, development, testing, and deployment.
