Refactoring

Migrating a decades-old application to the cloud through refactoring poses serious challenges and the enterprise faces the refactoring approach dilemma: a "Big-bang" approach or an incremental refactoring.

A "big-bang" approach focuses all efforts with the refactoring of the monolith, postponing the development and implementation of any new features - essentially delaying progress and possibly, in the process, even breaking the core of the business, the monolith.

An incremental refactoring approach guarantees that new features are developed and implemented as modern microservices which are able to communicate with the monolith through APIs, without appending to the monolith's code. In the meantime, features are refactored out of the monolith which slowly fades away while all, or most its functionality is modernized into microservices. This incremental approach offers a gradual transition from a legacy monolith to modern microservices architecture and allows for phased migration of application features into the cloud.

Refactoring slowly transforms the monolith into a cloud-native application which takes full advantage of cloud features, by coding in new programming languages and applying modern architectural patterns. Through refactoring, a legacy monolith application lives on as a modular system adapted to fully integrate with today's fast-paced cloud automation tools and services.