Ebook

Monolith to microservices migration: 10 critical challenges to consider

A practical 10-part ebook that guides you through the process of re-architecting both your tech stack and organizational structure when transitioning from a monolithic to a microservices. Featuring examples from top engineering teams at Uber, Spotify, and Netflix, and how they've successfully navigated the transition.

Ebook

Everything you need to know to navigate your microservice migration

Chapter 1

Determining service boundaries and decomposing your monolith

The first major hurdle when decomposing a monolith app is defining appropriate boundaries for each microservice. We’ll cover how to break down a monolithic app into smaller, independently deployable services that align with business capabilities.

Principles covered: Domain-Driven Design, Single Responsibility Principle.

Patterns and techniques to address decentralized data management challenges

Learn how to navigate decentralized data management and deal with data consistency issues, increased complexity, and issues related to latency and integrity.

Patterns covered: Eventual consistency, The Saga pattern, Event sourcing, Domain-driven design (DDD), Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS). 
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Picking the right inter-service communication pattern for your microservices

Inter-service communication is an integral part of a successful microservices architecture. Handling all that communication efficiently—and avoiding adding excessive latency—is one of the major challenges of the microservices architecture.

Topics covered: Event-driven architecture, synchronous and asynchronous communication, fault-tolerance strategies.

Designing service discovery and load balancing in a microservices architecture

Learn how to implement service discovery and load balancing in the microservice infrastructure, to ensure that microservices can dynamically locate and connect with each other.

Topics covered: Dynamic service discovery, traffic management, fault-tolerance in distributed architectures.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Monitoring and observability for system stability

As distributed systems grow, tracking performance and health becomes challenging. Understand how monitoring and observability ensure system stability, using metrics, logging, and tracing to address complex interactions in microservices.

Topics covered: Metrics, centralized logging, distributed tracing.

Implementing effective testing and deployment strategies for microservices

Learn essential strategies, from unit to end-to-end testing, as well as deployment practices like blue-green, canary, and rolling updates, to ensure each service functions independently and cohesively.

Topics covered: Testing levels (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end), deployment strategies.
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

Reinforcing security and implementing access control

As microservices introduce more entry points for potential attacks, it’s important to secure each service. Explore best practices for protecting microservices, from token-based authentication and secure communication to Zero Trust principles.

Topics covered: Authentication, authorization, secure communication (TLS/mTLS), API gateway management, Zero Trust security.

Enhancing performance and scalability in microservices

Learn strategies to achieve high performance and scalability in a microservices architecture, and overcome challenges like inter-service latency, data management, and deployment complexities.

Topics covered: Capacity planning, caching, asynchronous communication, database optimization.
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

Adapting organizational culture for a successful microservices transition

Moving to a microservices architecture demands technical shifts, as well as changes in organizational culture and team collaboration. Understand how to transition from centralized, monolithic structures to a more autonomous, cross-functional setup.

Topics covered: Team autonomy, accountability, cross-functional collaboration, culture of ownership and knowledge-sharing.

Enhancing team collaboration and code ownership

Discover how to structure teams, define ownership, and establish practices that promote autonomy, accountability, and seamless coordination across services.

Principles covered: Cross-functional team structures, decentralized code ownership, collaborative practices, API contracts, autonomous CI/CD pipelines.
Chapter 10

About the author:

Emre Baran, ex-Googler, entrepreneur & software lead with 20+ years of experience. Cerbos founder.


  • 80+ pages of in-depth content
  • 10 migration examples
  • 6 months in making by our founder
  • Peer-reviewed by our senior architect
emre-baran

What’s inside the ebook

  1. Defining service boundaries and decomposition of a monolithic service.
  2. Benefits and drawbacks of decentralized data management and best patterns and techniques to address it.
  3. Interservice communication: picking the right communication patterns, and handling synchronous and asynchronous communication. 
  4. Service discovery, load balancing, and service meshes.
  5. Guidance on implemented monitoring and observability. 
  6. Testing and deployment strategies for microservices.
  7. How and where to implement and enforce security and access control.
  8. Challenges of creating performant and scalable services.
  9. How to navigate the organizational and cultural shift.
  10. Thoughts on collaboration and code ownership when building microservices.

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About Cerbos

Authorization management solution for authoring, testing, and deploying access control policies. Implement scalable and secure fine-grained authorization.