Strangler Pattern: Migrate to Microservices from a Monolithic App

June 26 2018
 

Migrating from a monolithic legacy application to microservices is never easy. The best approach is to take it slow, breaking off small chunks, or services, of the monolith and moving them to the cloud. So what’s the “Strangler” got to do with it? Read on.


In my 20-plus years in the software industry, I’ve worn a lot of hats: developer, DBA, performance engineer and—for the past 10 years prior to joining AppDynamics—software architect. I’ve been coding since sixth grade and have seen some pretty dramatic changes over the years, from punch cards and 8-inch floppies to DevOps and microservices.

This may surprise you, but during my career I’ve spent more time fixing broken software than building new and innovative applications. I’ve encountered pretty much every variety of enterprise software snafu, many requiring time-consuming fixes I had to do manually. There was a silver lining to this pain, however: I learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work in software development and deployment. Below are some observations drawn from my experiences in the field.

Enter the Strangler

You may already be familiar with the “Strangler Pattern,” an architectural framework for updating or modernizing software and enterprise applications. While the concept isn’t new—esteemed author Martin Fowler was discussing the pattern way back in 2004—it’s even more relevant for today’s microservices- and DevOps-focused organizations.

Essentially, the term is a metaphor for modern software development. The Strangler tree, or fig, is the popular name for a variety of tropical and subtropical plant species. Vines sprout from the top of the tree and extend their roots into the ground, enveloping and sometimes killing their host, and shrouding the carcass of the original tree under a thick set of vines.

This “strangler” effect is not unlike the experience that an organization encounters when  transitioning from a monolithic legacy application to microservices—breaking apart pieces of the monolith into smaller, modular components that can be built faster and deployed quicker. While the enterprise version of the Strangler tree won’t kill off its host entirely—some legacy functions won’t transfer to microservices and must remain—the strategy is essential for any organization striving for agile development.

A Hybrid Approach

The Strangler Pattern is a representation of agility within the enterprise. If you’re moving in the agile direction or doing a legacy modernization, you’re using the Strangler, whether you realize it or not.

The pattern helps software developers, architects, and the business side align the direction of their legacy transition. Anytime you hear “cloud hybrid,” “hybrid cloud” or “on-prem plus cloud,” it’s a Strangler Pattern, as the organization must maintain connectivity between its legacy application and the microservices it’s pushing to the cloud.

When enterprises start their agile journey, they soon realize there’s a huge cost of trying to reverse-engineer legacy code—much of it written in mainframe, Cobol, C++, or old .NET or Java—to make it smaller and more modular. They also discover that the hybrid or strangler approach, while certainly not easy, is easier than trying to rewrite everything.

Agile Enterprise vs. Agile Development

Developers are very quick to adopt agile. This may seem like a good thing, but it’s actually one of the core problems in organizations I’ve worked with over the years: Developers are agile-ready, the organization is not.

For a legacy transition to work, the focus must be on the agile enterprise, not just agile development. Processes must be in place to determine requirements, mock up screens, hash out wireframes, and generally move things along. Some businesses have this down—Google, Amazon and Netflix come to mind—but many companies don’t have these processes in place. Rather, they jump in head first, quickly going to microservices because of the buzz, without really considering the implications of what this will mean to their organizational requirements. The catalyst may be a new CTO coming in and saying, “Let’s move to the cloud.”

But a poorly conceived microservices transition, one where the entire enterprise neither embraces the agile philosophy nor understands what it means to go to a microservices strategy, can have disastrous consequences.

Bad App, Big Bill

Developers and DevOps and infrastructure folks usually understand what it means to go to a microservices strategy, but the business doesn’t always get it.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what microservices are and what they can do. For the Strangler Pattern to work, you need a comprehensive understanding of the potential impacts of a cloud transition.

I’ve seen situations where an application ran great on a developer’s local desktop, where it wasn’t a problem if the app woke every few seconds, checked a database, went back to sleep, and repeated this process over and over. But a month after pushing this app to the cloud, the company got a bill from its cloud provider for thousands of dollars of CPU time. Clearly, no one at the company considered the ramifications of porting this app directly to the cloud, rather than optimizing it for the cloud.

The moral? There are different approaches for different cloud models, migrations and microservice strategies. It’s critically important for your organization to understand the pros and cons of each approach, and how you as a developer or architect can work with the organization’s agile enterprise strategy.

Lift-and-Shift: A Fairy Tale

When attempting a “lift and shift”—moving an entire application or operation to the cloud—companies often adopt a methodical approach. They start with static services that can be moved easily, and services that don’t contain sensitive company data or personal customer information.

The ultimate goal of lift-and-shift is to move everything to the cloud, but in my experience that’s a fairy tale. It’s aspirational but not achievable: You’re either building for the cloud from the ground up or lifting some services, usually the ones easiest to shift. Whenever I mention “lift and shift” to developers, architects and customers, they usually laugh because they’ve gone through enough pain to understand it’s not entirely possible, and that their organization will be in a hybrid or transitional state for an extended period of time.

If you lift-and-shift an application that runs great on-prem, it’s likely to all of a sudden spin resources, causing you to scale unnecessarily because the code was written to perform in an environment that’s very different from the one it’s in. The Strangler Pattern again may come into play: understand what elements of your application or service are a natural fit for the cloud, e.g., have elasticity requirements or unpredictable scale, and move them first. You can then move the remaining pieces more easily into a cloud environment that behaves more predictably.

Putting It All Together

There are plenty of challenges that come with cloud migration. Your enterprise, top to bottom, must be ready for the move. If you haven’t invested in a DevOps strategy along with the people capable of executing it, codifying all the dependencies and deployment options to make an application run efficiently in the cloud, you’ll likely find your team pushing bug fixes all day and troubleshooting problems, rather than being agile and developing code and features that help users.

The ability to monitor your environment is fundamentally important as well. Being able to see the performance of your services, to quickly root-cause a breakdown in communication between microservices and their dependencies, is absolutely critical to an effective strategy.

Without an agile transformation, you’ll never truly achieve a microservices architecture. That’s why the Strangler Pattern is a good approach. You can’t just say one day, “We’re going agile and into the cloud,” and the whole organization replies, “Okay, we’re ready!”

You’ll meet resistance. Processes will have to be rewritten, code and deployment processes will need to change. It’s a huge undertaking.

The Strangler’s piecemeal approach makes a lot more sense. You don’t want to learn that you screwed up your continuous integration and development pipeline on 500 new microservices. It’s much wiser to start with two or three services and learn what works and what doesn’t.

I’ve experienced first-hand all of the software migration problems I’ve described above. I’ve repaired them manually, which was time-consuming and painful. The silver lining is that I learned a lot about fixing broken software, and now I’m able to share these hard-earned lessons.

In conclusion, be sure to implement a strategy using DevOps monitoring tools for continuous integration and deployment, as well as good monitoring and logging systems to understand your performance.

Jason Bolzau
Jason Bolzau is a Solutions Engineer with AppDynamics specializing in .NET and Microsoft technologies. Prior to joining AppDynamics, Jason was an AppDynamics customer and spent over 20 years in technology roles ranging from Software Developer to Architect, working primarily on building and managing highly-scalable and performant enterprise applications.

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