A Microservice Approach for Legacy Modernisation

Very large portion of the world’s business critical systems are considered to be ‘legacy’ –and so is the code underpinning them (ie COBOL, PASCAL, C, to name a few).  Although in many cases it is the case that these systems are robust, stable and fit for the main purpose they were originally built, they aren’t flexible and scalable enough to support emerging requirements mainly derived from a more demanding ‘always on the move’ and ‘always connected’ user.

These systems struggle to meet these demands mainly because of the ‘monolithic’ approach on which they were built and the complexity hidden in millions of lines of code that is only understood a very few hand-full of people that still remain active from the teams that several years ago developed these systems.

In almost an equal amount there have also been thousands of failed attempts to modernise these legacy systems. The ‘eating the elephant’ in one go approach certainly didn’t work, and the traditional SOA approach alone although worked till certain extend, it also fell short when it came down to addressing specific requirements around scalability and platform/service inter-dependencies.

In this presentation I talk about how a legacy modernisation framework based on Microservice Architecture (MSA) in conjunction with some other known SOA patterns (ie. ESB, API Gateway), can be applied to ‘eat the elephant one piece at the time’ but most importantly ‘without getting indigestion’.

A microservice approach for legacy modernisation from luisw19

I did this presentation at the AMIS Beyond the Horizon conference that took place near Amsterdam in June 2-3 2016. Thank you AMIS and Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema for the opportunity to present in what was a very unique and wonderful conference full of great people, knowledge and fun!