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Decomposition.md

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Decomposition Pattern

1. Context

Organizations with large monolithic applications often face scalability, manageability, and agility challenges. This is especially evident when there's a need to move to cloud-native architectures or when the organization wants to adopt DevOps practices. The Decomposition Pattern is commonly used to transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture.

2. Problem

Monolithic architectures become increasingly difficult to manage, scale, and update as they grow. Modifying a single component requires redeploying the entire application, which increases the risk and complexity of making changes. Additionally, the architecture often becomes a bottleneck for adopting new technologies or scaling specific components independently. How can we make this architecture more modular, scalable, and manageable?

3. Solution

Decompose the monolithic application into a set of loosely coupled microservices. Each microservice should ideally represent a single business capability and should be independently deployable and scalable. This decomposition is generally guided by principles like domain-driven design to ensure that each microservice aligns with a specific business function or process.

4. Benefits

  • Scalability: Each microservice can be scaled independently, allowing for more efficient resource utilization.

  • Agility: Enables faster development cycles and the ability to update or add new features more rapidly.

  • Technological Freedom: Microservices can be developed, deployed, and scaled using different technologies that best fit their requirements.

  • Fault Isolation: Failures in one service have limited impact on the availability and functionality of other services.

5. Drawbacks

  • Complexity: The shift from a monolithic to a microservices architecture introduces complexities like inter-service communication, data consistency, and service discovery.

  • Data Management: Decomposing a monolith often involves breaking down a unified database into databases that are specific to each service, requiring strategies for data consistency and integrity.

  • Operational Overhead: Requires more sophisticated operational tools and practices for deployment, monitoring, and logging, adding to operational complexity.

  • Migration Cost: The process of decomposing a monolith can be resource-intensive, requiring careful planning, coordination, and testing.

6. Alternative Solutions

  • Modular Monolith: Instead of fully decomposing into microservices, keep a monolithic architecture but make it modular for easier management and partial scaling.

  • Serverless Functions: For certain use-cases, breaking down functionalities into serverless functions may offer some of the advantages of decomposition without the overhead of managing microservices.