How To Eat An Elephant

Breaking down monolithic systems. One service at a time.

There’s a joke that goes, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer, quite simply, is “one bite at a time.”

I think it’s a good metaphor for how enterprise organizations should look at migrating away from their monolithic platforms. For those large organizations relying on monolithic platforms as their primary technology, breaking free from its monolithic architecture may seem like a daunting task, maybe like eating a whole elephant. However, embracing the MACH principles - Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless - can empower businesses to transition away from these monolithic beasts, one “bite” or service at a time. 

This article will explore how a forward-thinking agency can guide an enterprise business through a MACH-based architecture, unlocking agility, customization, and innovation.

Adopting a MACH mindset

How to eat the proverbial elephant by breaking away from monolithic systems and adopting modern technical architecture one piece at a time.

Assessing Business Needs and Challenges

Before embarking on this feast, it's essential to understand the unique needs and challenges the enterprise business faces or why you want to eliminate the elephant in the room. This introspective analysis helps the agency grasp the limitations of the existing monolithic platform and pinpoint areas that require improvement, customization, or integration with external systems. By understanding these issues deeply, an agency can design an architecture that addresses specific pain points and aligns with the organization's goals. At Acro Commerce, the common complaints we hear about these platforms' elephants are:

• It’s incredibly expensive
• It’s incredibly slow to get anything done on it
• Employees hate the UX
• The long pipeline of work

BUT, it’s ingrained in everything, usually at a significant cost to the company. Due to this, they typically have an extensive technical team behind it, too, because while it is slow and it is expensive, it also gets the job done. Eventually. 

Keep in mind, at a point, many SaaS microservice-based solutions start to act like monolithic systems as the complexity, cost and rate of change begin to balloon.

Breaking Down Monolithic Capabilities

The first step toward leaving behind a monolithic platform is to break down its capabilities into smaller, specialized microservices. If you’ve identified the areas of pain for each individual stakeholder, this should be pretty straightforward. By collaborating closely with the business, an agency like Acro Commerce can help identify the various components and functions within this system that need to decouple or break free from the platform. These could be just small bites or larger “stuff your face” type targets, encompassing something as small as the login to more significant components around customer management, sales processes, marketing automation, reporting, and more. Each function becomes a distinct microservice, aligning seamlessly with the MACH principles.

Microservices for Business Capabilities

With the monolithic functions divided, the agency designs or implements microservices that encapsulate specific business capabilities. Each microservice concentrates on performing a single task exceptionally well. 

For example, a microservice could handle customer data management, while another manages single or multiple steps in the sales process. 

This modular approach facilitates each microservice's independent development, scalability, and maintenance. It empowers the enterprise business to adapt, add, modify, or replace services as requirements evolve, not vendor-locking the organization to a particular technology or vendor.

The best part about this approach is that it’s iterative and continual. If an organization only takes one bite at a time, it’s less of an upfront investment, reduces risk and proves the process for the next service and one after, and so on.

API-first Integration

An API-first approach, using a bite-by-bite technique, is crucial to ensure smooth integration with existing systems and future technologies. 

A strong system integration agency, or SI, will be able to craft well-defined APIs for each microservice, enabling seamless interaction and integration with external systems, microservices and the existing monolithic platform. This approach minimizes disruptions to your workflows while allowing for the phased approach we suggest. 

APIs serve as the communication bridge between microservices, facilitating data exchange and event-driven workflows pulled from the monolithic system to their own individual service. By embracing an API-first strategy, the enterprise business gains the flexibility to leverage a broader ecosystem of applications and services.

Embracing Cloud-native Infrastructure

Transitioning away from any monolithic system presents an opportunity to leverage the benefits of cloud-native infrastructure and how they are designed to be used. In situations like this, an agency like Acro Commerce assists the enterprise business in migrating their microservices to popular cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud as they are built out. 

Cloud-native infrastructure provides scalability, elasticity, and resilience, empowering the business to scale individual microservices based on demand, reduce infrastructure costs, and rapidly deploy updates and new functionalities. 

Imagine you’re eating this elephant but don’t want to get full. You don’t want a stomach ache to ruin the entire experience. What cloud-native infrastructure does (and this is a bit of a stretch for the analogy's sake) is put each bite or “service” in its own stomach. This way, one stomach ache or a larger bite doesn’t impact the rest of the meal. 

While many monolithic platforms boast cloud-first infrastructure, the benefits I mentioned earlier only truly shine in a microservice setup. 

Headless Architecture for Frontend Flexibility

At this point, I have probably beat this analogy to death, but I’m too far in to back out now. The thing with monolithic platforms elephants is, more often than not, what you see is what you get. There’s no hiding an elephant behind a tiger, you can still tell it’s an elephant, and it’ll still act like an elephant. The same goes for the front-end experience with monolithic platforms. 

By adopting a headless architecture, enterprise businesses can decouple the frontend presentation layer from the backend services. Skilled UX designers work together with the business to create a customized front-end experience. This experience uses data and features provided by microservices. It also empowers the organization to deliver content and experiences across multiple channels and devices, such as web, mobile, IoT devices, and voice assistants. The headless approach ensures independent development and deployment of frontend and backend components, enabling faster iterations and customization.

Data Migration and Integration

A critical step in the feast transition process is migrating data from the old platform to the new microservices architecture. An API-first approach simplifies this with a robust data migration strategy to ensure a smooth transfer of existing data while preserving data integrity and consistency. Furthermore, in architecture scenarios like this, Acro Commerce can assist in integrating the microservices with essential enterprise systems like an ERP, a CRM, or analytics platforms, fostering a unified and interconnected ecosystem.

While we would be pulling vital information from the monolithic system to drive this microservice, the data architecture and approach to designing a MACH system allow for seamless data transfer despite the fact it leaves (and often returns) to the old system. MACH allows the bi-directional flow of data to have no or minimal impact on the user experience. 

Continuous Improvement and Iteration

Eating an elephant cannot be done in a day, month, or even rarely a year. These 15,000-pound animals can’t be scarfed down easily, and definitely not alone. It’s an ongoing, iterative process to get it just right. 

Much the same, the transition to a MACH-based architecture is an ongoing journey. It takes close collaboration across numerous business units and hundreds of stakeholders, continuously monitoring, optimizing, and evolving the microservices architecture in response to changing needs and emerging technologies. Practices like performance monitoring, user feedback collection, and regular updates and enhancements ensure the architecture remains adaptable and future-proof. The best part about it is once this investment is made in this area, it only gets easier to change it again to meet the ever-changing needs of enterprise organizations.

Conclusion

So that’s how you eat an elephant and why large organizations should look at migrating away from monolithic systems using a “bite-by-bite” process. By embracing the MACH principles and collaborating with an experienced agency specializing in system integration, enterprise businesses can successfully transition away from a monolithic platform, no matter how ingrained it is. Adopting microservices, API-first integration, cloud-native infrastructure, and a headless architecture empower organizations with the agility, flexibility, and scalability required to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. This approach enables businesses to customize, innovate, and seamlessly integrate with external systems while liberating themselves from the constraints of a monolithic platform.

AT ACRO COMMERCE, WE WANT TO HELP YOU EAT YOUR ELEPHANT.