BrainBlog for vFunction by Jason English
Part 2 in the Uncovering Technical Debt series: An Intellyx BrainBlog for vFunction. Check out part one here.
Decompose, analyze, break into services, refactor. Whatever methods and tools you use to bring legacy code and architecture up to modern standards, there’s a science to enterprise application modernization.
But what if that science is archaeology?
If so, we want to spend less time manually digging and dusting and more time studying the artifacts and culture. We’d much rather be Indiana Jones, on an exciting journey to find hidden gems, than an unpaid grad student piecing together shards of pottery.
One thing is for certain. Many have tried modernization, and many have failed. According to a 2022 study by Wakefield Research, 92% of surveyed professionals responsible for a core system surveyed have started, or are planning to start, an app modernization project – but 4 out of 5 reported already failing on one or more such projects.
Monoliths were built for a reason
To some, a monolith would be any system that was already in place before they were an employee of the organization.
That’s a gross generalization, but it’s not that far off the mark. Just about any company that has grown over a period of a few years is maintaining at least one monolith, if not more. Add in an acquired company, and add in another business monolith.
The people who originally architected these monoliths have likely moved on or retired. The legacy code inside them was written well before there was a concept of cloud, or microservices, or auto-scaling clusters to meet demand.
According to the survey, 99% of the professionals reported serious challenges in maintaining monolithic apps. Executives lamented keeping up with business requirements and growing technical debt as leading challenges, while IT architects cited a shortage of skilled maintainers, followed by technical debt.
Even as it accrues technical debt, a monolith handles an extremely critical operation for the business. Much like a sacred artifact, removing the monolith from its perch would bring about certain doom. That’s why whole departments have sometimes been appointed as ‘temple guardians’ – installing security perimeters, failsafes, and draconian change control request boards around the monolith to ensure its operations are never interrupted.
Most companies put off modernizing monoliths longer than they should due to fear and uncertainty – but there is always a moment when the business can’t afford to not change. Time for our intrepid explorers to swap out the production system with an upgraded one, hopefully without setting off any traps.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
