One day at a time

Ant to Gradle Migration Ant served us very well and was our only build tool for last few years. Last year we decided to move on to new build system as we were adopting micro services architecture and dev ops culture. That means we were building brand new services and also carving out independent services from current monolith application. This requires modern, flexible build tool that helps in faster development. Maven and Gradle were two choice. I did look at some other choices but was afraid if we would get all the support we needed or not. I ended up choosing Gradle since I really like to program my build tool than putting it in xml. Also Gradle was gaining ground and large community support was good enough for me to trust and go on with it.  We are done with entire migration now and here some of my thoughts on this migration.   Ant build.xml Very early on we took decision not to invoke existing Ant's build.xml from Gradle's build.gradle. We not only wanted t...

We successfully migrated our application from one big monolith server to micro-services architecture. In process we learned a lot and I thought it will be good exercise to point of out issues with monolith servers and challenges involved in migrating to micro-services architecture. Monolith Servers Monolithic servers are not designed to be monolithic but become one over a period of time. Initially these applications provide basic functionality of intended use case. These applications provide quick proof of concept and enables product owners to roll out new features in relatively short time. These applications have smaller resource footprint and performs better. But as time goes on, applications becomes heavy. More services, features, workflows are added. Since these are exiting times for the organizations, engineers and product owners are more concerned with customers and capturing market share. In order to keep performance and stability metrics intact, more powerful hardware a...