A senior Keyhole Consultant led an architectural assessment for a cash flow management client. The goal was for the consultant to lay out a roadmap for the incremental migration away from legacy Ember.js front-end and Rails-based monolithic architecture to a microservices and React front-end implementation.
It’s important to thoroughly consider both the benefits and drawbacks of microservices architecture before you implement it. It’s also important to implement robust testing strategies to ensure the reliability and quality of the overall system.
Over the course of this blog, I’ll explore the good, the bad, and the testing side of microservices. My hope is that this will give you a starting point as you consider whether microservices architecture is right for your project.
The project included an assessment of an existing monolithic application and recommendations for modernizing it to achieve the goals of the initiative—mainly a cloud-first, performant, and microservices-based implementation. Specific technology suggestions were proposed in addition to the reasoning behind each recommendation. While proprietary details cannot be shared, generalized takeaways are included. Client Consulting Relationship The client was a global leader …
Back in 2015 and 2016, I wrote two blogs that went step by step to develop a microservice/Netty architecture with fully working code called Whirlpool.
A lot has changed in the years since, so recently I decided to come back to the project, update it with the latest versions of Kafka and Netty, and add a React UI to it (rather than the vanilla JavaScript version it used before). In addition, I also added Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) scripts in addition to the Mac and Linux scripts that were there before and made all of the scripts more robust.
This blog will be about the work that went into all of those updates, plus a look at the new React UI. This provides an excellent view into what it takes to update an outdated microservices application implemented with Kafka (version .9 –>3.0) and Netty (4.1.3->5.0.0-alpha2), bringing all versions up to date and adding a React UI. By the end you’ll be familiar with the latest versions of these frameworks, know some “gotchas” to avoid, as well as understand how to integrate WebSockets into React.
Keyhole Consultants are currently leading an initiative at a large financial services firm to move a large, monolithic, legacy application running in the organization’s “on-premise” data center, to a microservice-based suite of applications running in the “cloud.” The application is being iteratively moved to containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes in the AWS Cloud.
The effort was centered on developing a more agile environment including process, practices, and technology choices, with the goal of cultivating a DevOps culture.
