Tutorial on how to decompose the Medrec Java EE monolith into microservices
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Legacy Java applications are difficult to modernize. Enterprises rely on these monolithic apps to power their businesses but face an urgent mandate to move to the cloud and adopt a cloud native architecture. The following sections track the process of refactoring the Medrec application (also known as the Avitek Medical Records application), a monolithic WebLogic sample Java EE application, into microservices and deploying the new microservices on Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE). This tutorial is also available on the vFunction website. The key goal in refactoring the Medrec application will be to identify the services to extract from the monolith, their interfaces, and the classes included in their scope. Following this analysis, we will be able to extract each service, so it can be developed and deployed separately on a Kubernetes cluster such as OKE, using Oracle’s tooling to create WebLogic-based docker containers. The vFunction process follows three steps that accelerate the application modernization process using intelligent automation that observes actual business domain flows and replaces months of manual work and tedious modernization labs. vFunction dynamic analysis observes the actual Medrec business flows and behaviors via a JVM agent then applies static analysis of the bytecode for static dependencies and to assure code coverage. An initial application migration assessment report (see image below) measures application complexity across five dimensions, specifies the set of initial services that vFunction has identified, and related classes, API end points, and exclusivity calculations.
