Usually product teams are designed to specialise in specific business capabilities. This specialisation enables teams to develop a deep understanding of their domain’s unique requirements and challenges. To overcome ambiguity, explicit and well-defined domain boundaries are crucial, ensuring that related business capabilities, processes, services, and data are kept within the same domain context.
While domains remain distinct, they provide services and data designed for accessibility and consumption by other domains. This approach fosters interoperability, collaboration, and standardization, facilitated by self-service-oriented platforms and shared services.
Defining domain boundaries, you need to start with assessing the application landscape, and determining the right target platform for migration, as well as devising a roadmap for refactoring or rebuilding by modernising and implementing multi grain services architecture, requires a structured approach.
Define Domain Boundaries:
To define boundaries we prefer to conduct workshops or meetings with stakeholders to identify and define distinct business capabilities or domains within your organization.
Clearly outline the scope and responsibilities of each domain, ensuring that they align with business objectives and customer needs.
Document domain boundaries, including the services, processes, and data associated with each domain.
Assess Application Landscape
Inventory existing applications, systems, and services within each domain.
Evaluate the technology stack, architecture, and dependencies of each application.
Analyze the scalability, performance, and maintainability of current systems to identify areas for improvement.
Determine Target Platform:
Consider factors such as performance requirements, data security, compliance regulations, and cost when selecting a target platform.
Assess the suitability of private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, or on-premises infrastructure based on your organization’s needs and capabilities.
Choose a platform that aligns with your long-term business goals and supports the scalability and flexibility required for micro or mini services architecture.
Develop Migration Roadmap:
Prioritize applications for migration based on business impact, complexity, and dependencies.
Determine the migration approach (lift and shift, refactor, or rebuild) for each application based on factors such as legacy technology, technical debt, and business value.
Create a phased roadmap that outlines the sequence of migrations, milestones, and timelines for each domain.
Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and success criteria to measure the effectiveness of the migration strategy.
Modernize and Implement Micro or Mini Services Architecture where applicable:
Identify opportunities to decompose monolithic applications into microservices or mini services that are modular, scalable, and loosely coupled.
Design service boundaries and APIs that reflect domain-driven design principles and facilitate interoperability between services.
Implement modern development practices such as DevOps, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and containerization to streamline the development and deployment of services.
Leverage cloud-native technologies and platforms to optimize resource utilization, improve scalability, and enhance resilience.
Continuous Improvement:
Establish feedback loops to gather insights from stakeholders, users, and team members throughout the migration process.
Continuously monitor the performance, reliability, and cost of migrated applications, making adjustments as needed to optimize the architecture and infrastructure.
Encourage a culture of innovation and experimentation, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing among product teams.