From Monoliths to Services: Paying Your Technical Debt

Ever since distributed software became popular, developers have been choosing whether to use monolithic architectures or service-oriented architectures. With the advancement of cloud infrastructure and the widespread implementation of agile methodologies, the latter approach has been getting much easier. David Litvak describes how a monolithic application—due to its ever increasing technical debt—can become too big to support. He explores how to gradually reduce the size by extracting its components into smaller services, so ultimately the application is decoupled and highly distributed. David describes the current situation of cloud services and software as a service providers, offering a list of these providers for many different uses. He shares an example of an e-commerce site implementation, starting with a full-blown traditional rails monolith and then moving toward a static site with automated rebuilds with CircleCI, Contentful as a decoupled CMS, Auth0 for authentication, and Snipcart as an e-Commerce as a Service provider. Join David as he shares how to create an architecture from interconnected services.