Accelerate Monolith Deployments. Without Microservices

This article shares a case study of applying a systemic approach to software production that supported the deployment acceleration of a monolith from 3 months to 3 days without microservices in a global e-retailer of 650m€ annual turnover and 95% of online sales.

“Accelerate” was one of the recurring words we got from business executives to keep the business competitive with fierce competition, scarce resources, and increasing uncertainty. With many options to look at, we had to step back on our production system to architect an incremental transformation.

The challenge was to avoid short-term shortcuts and single-solutions like “APis” or “Microservices” that would have kept us busy for many months, shown few results in the short-term, but created more problems in the mid-term especially with more complexity and technical debt.

We had to develop our software production system so that software changes were frequent, reliable and efficient to sustain our business in its reinvention. It means we had to go beneath superficial analysis to develop more precise actions and solutions.

A business-critical legacy monolith

We had a “legacy” system heritage that supported the business until now for about 10 countries for a multi-million retail business. A positive point for us had been to roll-out this system across all countries simplifying our current applicational landscape.