Serverless architecture is computing the need of the hour, and numerous companies are heading this route. You’re probably wondering whether you should make the transition too. You can reap enormous benefits from this application. However, the process may not be easy as it seems for a SaaS Company.

What should you do to make the transition? Nearshore development teams can help you move to serverless smoothly at a reasonable cost. They will help you maneuver through the challenges to accomplish the ultimate goal; going serverless and becoming more efficient.

To learn more about microservice to serverless transitioning, read on.

The Challenges When Moving From Monolithic to Microservices

The ever-changing business demands necessitate transitioning to new tools and technologies. New developments such as the DevOps are challenging in monolithic applications. Hence, most business owners are forced to move from monolithic to microservices. What are the challenges involved in this transition?

Related Post 👉 Why Should I Start Thinking About Using Microservices?

Decomposition

Microservice architecture is complex compared to monolithic applications. So, when moving from an existing monolith to a microservices architecture, you will need to use the right tools to lower the risks involved. This process involves decomposing the application into granular microservices.

Eventually, you get more moving parts in the application that can lead to infrastructural and operational overheads. For instance, deployment, security, and configuration management.

Testing

Before you get to run the application, you have to test it to avoid problems like rollbacks. Unfortunately, testing microservices can be difficult because the engineer you contract to write the test case must have a vast knowledge of each service that is part of the solution.

In addition to that, microservices are usually asynchronous, which poses many difficulties as you test. While you can adopt different approaches to solve the testing challenges, the process can be cumbersome and take much time. As a result, companies opt for nearshore software outsourcing in such situations since it’s easier to access top talent that way.

Persistence

A monolith application usually contains a single data store. On the contrary, the microservices application has multiple databases, each for a specific service. Understanding how you can manage this decentralized data is challenging.

Additionally, splitting the monolithic application to fit the microservices application is stretching. The reason being, as you break the application, you have to maintain transactional integrity and data. Moreover, you have to query data that spreads across multiple services.

Organizational Challenges

Moving from monolithic to microservice architecture poses organizational challenges, for instance, the organization’s structure. When using a monolithic application, a business will have large teams attending to different roles. For example, database administration, quality assurance, and development.

However, for microservices to be successful, good communication is necessary between the stakeholders and team members. This structure involves hand-offs that cause slower development cycles. The good thing is that nearshore staff augmentation can fix this for you.

Transaction Management

Monolith applications entail in-process invocations making transaction management easy for businesses. Conversely, a microservices-based application has each microservice maintaining a different database. Thus, you have to consider each of these, making transaction management difficult.

Moreover, the stateless nature of microservices demands several remote invocations to fulfill a request. Some businesses address this challenge through event-based programming to notify a microservice anytime a change takes place.

Inter-Process Communication

Typically, in every distributed system, all parts should communicate with each other. Microservices is no exception in this, and therefore organizations are forced to use inter-process communication. However, inter-service communication poses numerous challenges when employed in this application.

Unlike in microservices, monolithic components communicate through function calls. Thus, you don’t have to deal with service interaction issues and come up with ways to handle failures.

Deployment

Deployment of monolithic architecture involves setting one application per machine/host and then scaling the application vertically. On the other hand, deployment for a microservices-based application uses various patterns.

For instance, One Service instance per Container and Multiple service instances per Host. Consequently, you may experience operations overhead since you are running numerous services and version management.

Now, Moving From Microservices to Serverless, What Does It Mean for a Nearshore SaaS Developer? 

Migrating from an existing microservices architecture to a serverless application is key to reducing the organization’s expenditure on technical resources. However, the process comes with its challenges.

Nearshore SAAS Developer working on a project.

While most businesses are planning to transition due to the numerous benefits of serverless architecture, they need to understand what it involves.

What does moving from microservices to serverless entail?

Comparing Microservices and Serverless Architecture

The first thing you should consider before transitioning any application is the difference between the two solutions. Understanding where the microservices architecture is strong is necessary when designing the application in a serverless context.

The reason being, the closer the source architecture is to the target, the lesser challenges you are likely to face in your migration. Thanks to the numerous elements common in microservices and serverless, they give you a less difficult experience. Nevertheless, they have differences that account for why serverless is gaining more popularity.

Microservice architecture defines a function and assigns it its private web application. For instance, a payment service processes payments while an inventory service focuses on physical goods warehouse and online drop shippers to cater to customer orders.

The serverless application breaks the microservice distinction further into the constituent actions to be taken. For example, when the microservice has a payment server with distinct endpoints such as charge or refund, a serverless will assign different functions to these endpoints.

Preparing to Migrate

Programming language concept by a system engineer.The next essential thing you need to do is taking full stock of what you want to migrate. Below are some areas you need to focus on as you prepare to transition

Mapping Date Usage

You need to understand how the application’s data flow. Knowing the codes that influence different objects will help you design a serverless API that will prompt your application’s data usage.

Service Interactions

The next step is to map all the interactions between each microservice in your application. Learn the interdependencies in the application and how they will change after every endpoint is assigned its function.

Entry Points

Now it’s time to examine the entry points for your application. They include the crucial functions of the application; for instance, the API calls that the application’s frontend leverages to populate views that your users utilize to interact.

Data Migrations Planning

Lastly, you need to examine your data storage requirements before you start the process. Building on AWS Lambda is more likely to reap great benefits. However, its invocations incur charges on data transfers and compute usage.

Seems like an engaging process that can be frenzying if you have a tight schedule. Getting a top nearshore SaaS developer can help you maneuver through this smoothly.

Migration Process

The migrations process starts with breaking down each microservice into low and high-level functions. The granularity depends on how fast you want to move, and it gets difficult with complex communication.

Hence, you need to choose a breakdown approach that matches the complexity level of your application. You should also make sure the critical aspects of the business functionality are thoroughly tested by moving them first to the serverless architecture.

With nearshore outsourcing, you can have this done exceptionally to avoid problems when running your application. Besides, having someone skilled in this can save you much time and money.

So, what next after migration?

After migrating to a serverless application, you need to optimize communication, tackle resource serialization, and performance optimization. Most CTOs and CIOs find these tasks daunting since they have more duties to attend to. Thanks to nearshore development which does all these at a reasonable price.

Serverless, the Future of Software Development Cloud-Based

The cloud services field is fast-paced and ever-growing, with several service types. Consequently, there exists a progressive demand for higher capacity, resource, and computing resources. The serverless architect is one innovation that has been meeting all these demands.

Serverless cloud computing allows businesses to focus more on developing, managing and deploying their applications. This paradigm shift is essential in eliminating the tedious task of system administration.

Related Post 👉 What is Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

With serverless architecture, you no longer have to tackle issues such as housekeeping and maintenance. Thus, your business can develop and produce high top-quality applications. Presently, companies are either shifting from microservices to serverless or developing new serverless applications due to the numerous benefits that come with it. They include

  • Facilitating on-demand performance tasks.
  • Performing specific coding functions.
  • Useful in applications with IoT.
  • With nearshore software outsourcing, you get to save time and money.

All these lead to high efficiency and better resource utilization; thus, it is becoming more suitable for many businesses. You can hire a competent nearshore SaaS developer to enjoy these benefits if you plan to enhance your organization’s operation.

Boost Your Business’ Efficiency by Migrating From Microservices to Serverless Application!

Dealing with monotonous administration tasks can be cumbersome and lead to inefficiency in an organization. Thanks to serverless architecture, it lifts some of these responsibilities off your shoulder to concentrate on more significant tasks.

You can get help with transitioning from your microservices application to serverless at a reasonable price. Feeling worried you won’t find the right professional for this? Don’t be anxious anymore, ParallelStaff has got you covered.

We can help you hire experienced nearshore, back-end development teams. They will help you migrate and optimize the different components of your system for optimal performance. Contact us today to connect with unrivaled nearshore experts!

Mike Hernandez