Shorticle 882 – Reduce your technical risk during IT transformation through Strangler pattern
When your organization want to get away from legacy IT solutions and adopt new age technologies for Technical Debt reduction, you need to plan well for reducing the risks in IT transformation. This could get bigger when your technical complexity is more, application dependency is high and technical stack and architecture is too complex.
There are many standards and best practices to reduce the technical risks in IT transformation and Strangler pattern is one of the best option that you should think of for safer bet. Stranger pattern is one of the popular design pattern strategy which can be used to upgrade technical stack (to address technical currency upgrade) or modernize your technical stack (to address technical debt) and architecturally implement strategical changes (to modernize your architecture).
In Strangler pattern, each components and buildable modules in the old architecture is considered as isolated deployable units and you develop a parallel deployable unit with modernized technical stack or architecture and both the old and new modules will co-exists until your quality assurance and validation tests completes in new components.
When both old and new modules co-exists, network communication and interfacing applications/services (eg: Upstream and downstream services) will also co-exist (ideally one behaves like a dummy service) and once validation completes, old components will be decommissioned and new components will become production ready to use.
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Strangler pattern reduces technical risks as anytime you can fallback to old components if there is failure during testing new services, you have liberty to modernize technical stack in new components as there is no tight deadline as old services will be decommissioned only after new services become production ready and additional feature implementation and change requests can be combined during transformation.
But it is not an easy journey to implement strangler pattern as it requires very careful planning when you have large number of components to transform, configuration during decommission can itself be a separate project due to its complexity and effort required and defining the criteria for fallback is important to decide right approach to move forward or backward in your transformation journey.