Upcoming: Strangling a Monolith
What I'm working on and the content I'll be creating
Creating content is still new for me. My day-job is a Staff Engineer at TransferGo and while I used to lead the FinCrime team (doing lots of anti-money laundering, risk analysis, and compliance check stuff) I’ll soon be focusing on a totally new area of our system.
You may have guessed by the title, but I’ll primarily be tasked with extracting a new service from a monolith. And, when I say monolith - I really mean it!
There is a huge amount of legacy. Some serious spaghetti. Big balls of mud. Not only that, we’re handling significant traffic. We’re talking about a finance system with [redacted] amounts of transactions happening every second!
Essentially, my primary goals can be described like I will be “changing the tyres while the car is moving”, or “replacing the wings while the bird is in the air”.
Obviously, I’m excited and can’t wait to get started!
Before I jump right in, I’m fortunate to have time to investigate how things currently work, devise a plan and gather some feedback on the design of the new system. I also won’t be working in isolation and will be introducing team members at points throughout the process.
Therefore I plan to revise some strategies for splitting up monoliths.
What initially comes to my mind is:
Martin Fowler’s Strangler Pattern, and
Branch by Abstraction
Naturally, these are quite related and I’m undecided if I should create individual posts or videos for each topic - or a single piece of content.
If you have strong opinions on a video or article, let me know!