A phased approach to breaking apart a monolithic application without a risky big-bang rewrite, using the strangler fig pattern.
Phase 1: Identify seams, not services
Before extracting any service, map your monolith’s internal module boundaries and data ownership — the seams that already exist in your codebase (even informally) are far better extraction candidates than an idealized service boundary designed from scratch.
Phase 2: Strangle incrementally
Route a thin slice of traffic for one bounded context through a new service via an API gateway or reverse proxy, while the monolith continues serving everything else — this lets you validate the new service under real production load before committing further.
Phase 3: Address data ownership last, not first
Resist extracting a service’s database until the service itself has proven stable in production; premature data separation is the most common cause of modernization projects stalling on distributed transaction complexity.
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