While designing the approach for any legacy migration, the following design patterns crafted by Martin Fowler can be very helpful.
Having been in the architecture field for over a decade, I have realized that 'current state' and 'future state' architectures are just temporal states of reality!
It's impossible to predict the future; we can only be prepared for the future by designing our systems to be modular and highly flexible to change. Build an architecture that can evolve with time and be future-ready and not try to be future-proof.
Another humble realization is that - the code we are writing today; is nothing but the legacy code of tomorrow :)
And in today's fast-paced world, systems become 'legacy' within a short period of time. Legacy need not just mean a 50-year-old mainframe program. Even a monolithic Java application can be considered legacy. Gartner now defines legacy as any system that is not sufficiently flexible to meet the changing demands of the business.
- Strangler Pattern - http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerApplication.html
- Event Interception Pattern - http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/EventInterception.html
- Asset Capture Pattern - http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/AssetCapture.html
Instead of a rip-n-replace approach to legacy modernization, the gist of the above patterns is to slowly build a new system around the edges of the old system. To do this, we leverage event driven architecture paradigms to capture inbound events to the old system and route these events to the new system. This is done incrementally till we can kill the old system.
Having been in the architecture field for over a decade, I have realized that 'current state' and 'future state' architectures are just temporal states of reality!
It's impossible to predict the future; we can only be prepared for the future by designing our systems to be modular and highly flexible to change. Build an architecture that can evolve with time and be future-ready and not try to be future-proof.
Another humble realization is that - the code we are writing today; is nothing but the legacy code of tomorrow :)
And in today's fast-paced world, systems become 'legacy' within a short period of time. Legacy need not just mean a 50-year-old mainframe program. Even a monolithic Java application can be considered legacy. Gartner now defines legacy as any system that is not sufficiently flexible to meet the changing demands of the business.
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