A few weeks ago I did a talk on refactoring monoliths for the Chicago Java Users Group. It was a short lightning talk about some of the alternatives that developers have when refactoring large monoliths. In the talk I went over how the problem came to be, and what some of the alternatives were and their pluses/minuses.
The slides to the talk can be found here:
https://www.slideshare.net/StevenHicks6/refactoring-the-monolith
Why did I do this talk?
This talk was mostly done due to my observation of the cargo-cult reaction to monoliths and reactoring. Yes, the monolith is pretty big and bulky, however it does get the job done. However, the popular opinion about what to do with them is to make a ton of microservices. In the long run, it just turns one monolith into a lot of noisy monoliths.
What did I learn?
The video of the talk hasn’t come out yet, however I feel like I had 2 things that could have been:
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Time the talk better. I felt influenced by the prior presenters to rush to finish in an unstated time limit.
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More practice could have made this talk smoother.