Extracting microservices as a surgeon
“Surgeons should consider not only how to operate, but if they should operate.”
— Benjamin Carson
Microservices has become the de facto for building distributed systems. It would be a lot easier to build it from scratch. But that’s not the case most of the time, as monolithic systems will be built first and microservices will be carved out down the line.
In this article, I’ll show strategies to extract microservices from a monolith and how it goes hand in hand with a surgeon’s role. In any surgery, it involves 3 phases: preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative. One can imagine the same steps involved in microservice extraction as well.
1. Preoperative: Preparing for microservice extraction
The preoperative phase is the time period between the decision to have surgery and the beginning of the surgical procedure. This phase also involves study of the patient, his current condition and illness. It involves a certain degree of operational readiness.