Understand the challenges involved in adopting microservices and the strategies to mitigate themThe ever-changing business needs of the industry have necessitated the growing need of the right tools and technologies and the evolution of design and architecture methodologies. Keeping pace with the new development approaches such as DevOps has been a challenge in monolithic applications.Microservices architecture is a result of this growing demand and has become immensely popular over the past few years. It is a variant of service-oriented architecture that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled, lightweight services that are maintainable, testable, independently deployable and organized around business capabilities. This article examines the strategies, methods and best practices in transitioning a monolith to a microservice.From monolith to microserviceThere are two approaches to developing applications using microservices architecture. These include the following:1.) Build the application using microservices architecture from the beginning2.) Build a monolith and the migrate it gradually to microservicesMigrating an existing monolithic application to microservices is a journey thats worthwhile, but not at all an easy one. Transitioning to microservices creates significant challenges for the organizations as well.Okay, so what are the challenges?To reap the benefits microservice architecture, you should choose the right strategy, communicate the expectations and requirements to the team members and mitigate the challenges involved in transitioning an existing monolith to a microservice.The challenges faced in transitioning a monolith to a microservice can broadly be classified into the following:Decomposition Microservices architecture is complex than legacy applications. To handle this complexity and reduce the risks involved, you should use the right tools and technologies in place. In transitioning an existing monolith to a microservices, you would typically need to decompose the existing application into granular microservices. During this transitioning process, you would typically need to decompose the monolith to building more and more granular microservices to suit the business needs. Once this is accomplished, there would be more moving parts in the application. As a result, this would lead to operational and infrastructural overheads, i.e., configuration management, security, provisioning, integration, deployment, monitoring, etc. One of the ways to reduce these complexities is in using containerization. In using containerization, provisioning, configuration, and deployment of microservices would be simplified.Testing - Testing microservices can become challenging, particularly the integration tests. To write an effective integration test case, the QA engineer should have good knowledge of each of the services that are a part of the solution. Another reason why testing a microservices-based application is difficult is because microservices-based applications are generally asynchronous. The best approach to solving these testing challenges is adopting various testing methodologies and tools and leveraging continuous integration capabilities through automation and standard agile methodologies. Performance - The increase in resource usage may cause a microservices-based application to execute slower. You can overcome this challenge by introducing additional servers. Logging in any application can be a part of the solution - you can log performance data and detect the problems. You should take advantage of logging to store performance data in a repository so that you can analyze the data at a later point of time. You can implement throttling, handle service timeouts, implement dedicated thread pools, implement circuit breakers and take advantage of asynchronous programming to boost the performance of microservice-based applications. Security - In a typical microservices architecture, communication between the services can be in the same or different machines - even between different data centers. Due to this complexity in the communication, security in a microservices-based application is important to authorize access to a protected resource.In a monolith the facade pattern to aggregate the data that is retrieved from multiple services. On the contrary, in a microservices-based application, the API Gateway is used for the same purpose. The API Gateway pattern can be used in a microservices-based application to secure access to the microservices by abstracting the underlying microservices from external clients. The other strategies that are adopted include implementation of SSL, OAuth, and containerization.Inter-service communication - In a distributed system, the components should be able to communicate with each other and in microservices-architecture, it is no exception. In a monolithic application, the components invoke one another through method or function calls. In contrast, a microservices-based application is distributed in nature with each service running isolated from another service. Hence, it is imperative that services in a microservice-based application communicate using inter-process communication (also known as IPC) mechanisms. However, inter-service communication in a microservices-based application poses a lot of challenges.Since microservices are distributed in nature, remote invocation of these services is a challenge and you should understand the necessary patterns to overcome the challenges involved. Since services in a microservice-based application communicate with one another using IPC mechanisms you should consider issues like, how the services will interact, how to handle failures, etc.Organizational challenges There are certain organizational challenges involved in moving from monolithic architecture to microservice architecture as well. One such challenge is the organizations structure. An organization that builds a monolithic application typically have large teams with distinct roles, i.e., development, quality assurance, testing, database administration, etc. For microservices-architecture to be successful, there should be good communication between the team members and the stakeholders.Conways law states: Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organizations communication structure. So, it is evident that such organizations design systems in which the structure of the architecture is a replica of the organizations structure. This kind of structure results in slower development cycles due to the hand-offs involved. You can learn more about hand-offs from this article: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/how-agile-teams-can-minimize-hand-offsPersistence A monolithic application typically contains a single data store. In contrast, a microservices-based application contains multiple databases, typically one for each service. One of the key challenges in transitioning to microservices-based architecture is in understanding and handling how decentralized data management.Splitting the data model of a monolithic application to fit the autonomous data models of a microservices-based application is challenging. Breaking a monolith data model into separate autonomous data models that are local to each microservice is a daunting task primarily because of the need to maintain data and transactional integrity. Another challenge with a microservices-based application is querying data that spans across multiple services - it was a piece of cake with the monolith-based approach, wasnt it?Deployment Deployment of a microservices-based application can be challenging. Unlike a monolith where you typically deploy one application per host/machine and then scale the application vertically, you can deploy a microservices-based application using various patterns, i.e., Multiple service instances per Host, One Service instances per Host or One Service instance per Container.Operations overhead for running so many services and version management are two of the challenges. You should have an infrastructure management strategy in place and have automated, proactive monitoring of the infrastructure from time to time.Transaction management - Transaction management in a monolith is simple as it involves in-process invocations. On the contrary, transaction management in a microservices architecture is not straight forward. Each and every microservice maintains its own private database. Added to this, microservices are stateless in nature and hence to fulfill a request there might be a need for several remote invocations. One way to address this challenge is through event-based programming - you can trigger events and notify a microservice when there is a change of state.SummaryAn organization willing to transition from monolith to microservices should evaluate the cost and the benefits of the transition. Albeit the fact that adoption of microservice in most cases can facilitate rapid application development, continuous integration and faster releases, for some organizations this can also be detrimental, i.e., the challenges might outweigh the rewards.

Vantage Data Centers, a leading provider of data centers in support of business and mission-critical applications, is expanding its presence across North America. The leading North American wholesale data center provider announced the acquisition of Canada-based 4Degrees Colocation, a wholesale specialist with data centers in Quebec City and Montral.4Degrees Colocation is a subsidiary of Canadian telecommunications provider Videotron. The acquisition is for approximately US$200 million (CA$259 million).Canada is an extremely attractive market for hyperscale, cloud and enterprise customers. Our acquisition of 4Degrees drastically decreases our time to market and increases our ability to provide the premier service and space that our clients desire, said Sureel Choksi, president and CEO, Vantage Data Centers.The company has not disclosed the details about the current capacity of the campus. However, Vantage Data Centers informed that they would start expansion projects in both markets. And this will raise 4Degrees Colocations total capacity to 31MW.Maxime Guvin, a leader in the construction, sales, and management of data centers, has been named vice president and general manager of Vantage Canada. He served as the general manager of 4Degrees Colocation for four years.The 4Degrees team has been in lockstep with Vantage throughout the closing process. Our cohesive team is prioritizing the creation and management of superior data center facilities across North America to support some of the worlds top brands, said Guevin.With the acquisition of 4Degrees, Vantage makes its presence in six markets in North America. Besides the latest campuses in Montreal and Quebec, Vantage has data centers in Santa Clara, Northern Virginia, Phoenix and Quincy, Washington. The company has nine operational facilities totaling 92MW of capacity and five additional facilities currently under development totaling 103MW.Vantage Data Centers recently acquired 50 acres of land in the Greater Phoenix area to build a mega-scale data center campus. Last year, it completed construction of its final data center at Vantages premier Santa Clara campus, known as V5.

Silver Peak, the global SD-WAN leader, announced that its SD-WAN platform, Unity EdgeConnect, has been certified for deployment in Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. With the latest announcement, Silver Peak has the broadest public cloud service partner ecosystem in the industry. It is the only SD-WAN vendor to partner with all four leading public cloud providers, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.The partnership will help geographically distributed enterprises execute multi-cloud strategies with the same network and application availability and resiliency. According to Silver Peak, enterprise customers will benefit from the ability to host EdgeConnect across any combination of the four leading public cloud services platforms with the same ease of deployment, feature, and license parity.Enterprise customers gain choice and control in how they execute multi-cloud strategies in alignment with their business requirements. By harnessing the full power of the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, they can deliver the highest quality of experience to their users whether applications or services are hosted in their own data centers or across any combination of leading public cloud providers data centers, said Chris Helfer, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Silver Peak.The company is confident that the multi-cloud strategy would offer many benefits to enterprises. With EdgeConnect, consistent deployment from customers branches to the cloud can be made possible. Thus, enterprises can extend the reach of their SD-WAN deployments into virtual private cloud environments to deliver the highest quality of experience for SaaS applications and IaaS instances. Silver Peak also promises reliable internet access using last mile broadband services for cloud connectivity.Silver Peaks partnership with cloud providers will provide the much-needed cloud flexibility to enterprises in the early stages of formalizing public cloud strategies. According to Silver Peak, more advanced cloud-connected enterprises benefit from leveraging the full power of the Silver Peak cloud ecosystem to execute multi-cloud strategies consistently. Moreover, with Unity BoostSilver Peaks WAN optimization add-on, enterprises can accelerate data access, dramatically reduce the amount of data transferred, and optimize application performance between cloud instances.

Vantage Data Centers, a leader in the wholesale data center space, is extending its facilities to high-growth Phoenix market. The leading provider of data centers in support of business and mission-critical applications has acquired 50 acres of land in the Greater Phoenix area to build a mega-scale data center campus. The site is located just outside of Phoenix in the city of Goodyear.Vantage Data Centers expects to begin the construction in early 2019. The first building with 32 MW of critical load is expected to be online in early 2020. According to the company, it will be the largest of Vantages seven current and planned campuses when complete.We continue to strategically expand Vantages footprint based on customer and market demands. This newest development in the southwest is an ideal location for our customers due to its tax incentives, low power costs, and rich connectivity. Our strong sales pipeline is a testament that customers are attracted to our high-quality data centers with a focus on sustainable development and operational excellence, said Sureel Choksi, president and CEO of Vantage Data Centers.Phoenix will be the companys sixth data center market. It will harbor three data centers. The campus will be capable of 160MW critical load and will have more than 1 million square feet once fully developed.Georgia Lord, Goodyears Mayor, welcomed the companys move to the city. This innovative company leads the way in energy-efficient data centers, and they are changing the landscape of the West Valley to a forward-thinking focus. We welcome them to our growing cluster of technology-based businesses and foresee a great partnership emerging, he said.Vantage Data Centers has so far extended its footprint into six strategic marketsSilicon Valley, Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Quincy in Washington, Montreal, and Quebec City, Canada. Last year, it completed construction of its final data center at Vantages premier Santa Clara campus, known as V5. The company has nine operational facilities totaling 92MW of capacity and five additional facilities currently under development totaling 103MW.