What is the Strangler Pattern? A Complete Overview

by Terence Bennett • September 19, 2024

 

Modernizing legacy systems is often a daunting task, often filled with risks and uncertainties. The Strangler Pattern offers a proven, incremental approach to replace these outdated systems by gradually building new features around them, eventually phasing out the old system. The Strangler Pattern is a software modernization strategy that incrementally replaces parts of a legacy system with new functionality, allowing both systems to coexist until the legacy system is fully phased out. However, implementing the Strangler Pattern effectively can be challenging without the right tools. This is where DreamFactory comes in, providing a robust API management platform that simplifies the process of modernizing legacy systems.

Here’s the key things to know about the Strangler Pattern:

• The Strangler Pattern enables gradual modernization of legacy systems by incrementally replacing old functionality with new microservices.
• DreamFactory supports this process by generating RESTful APIs for legacy systems, allowing seamless integration and phased transitions.
• Microservices architecture complements the Strangler Pattern by enabling isolated, scalable, and independently deployable services.
• The Strangler Pattern can also facilitate the transition from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to microservices, allowing for a more flexible and scalable system.
• Key benefits include reduced risk, continuous business operation, and the ability to modernize systems incrementally without disrupting existing services.

What is the Strangler Pattern?

The Strangler Pattern is a strategy for modernizing legacy systems without the disruption of a complete system overhaul. Instead of replacing the entire system at once, new functionality is built around the existing system. Over time, as the new system grows and absorbs the legacy functionalities, the old system is "strangled" and eventually retired. This approach allows organizations to mitigate risk, manage complexity, and maintain business continuity throughout the modernization process.

Why the Strangler Pattern is Important

The Strangler Pattern is critical for modernizing legacy systems because it mitigates the risk of system failure during transitions. Traditional system overhauls often involve complete rewrites, which can introduce downtime, bugs, and operational disruptions. The Strangler Pattern avoids this by enabling incremental updates—new components are built around the legacy system, allowing old functionality to be slowly replaced.

Technically, it ensures business continuity by running old and new systems in parallel, giving teams time to validate new components. This parallel approach minimizes the risk of unexpected failures. It also allows for modular upgrades; specific parts of the system can be refactored or replaced without affecting the entire architecture. This incremental, controlled approach fits well with modern development practices like microservices and API-driven architecture. For companies with critical systems that cannot afford downtime, this pattern is invaluable.

Tooling and Automation in the Strangler Pattern

Effective use of tooling and automation is essential for implementing the Strangler Pattern, ensuring smooth, reliable migration from legacy systems. CI/CD pipelines play a critical role by automating the build, test, and deployment process for new microservices. With CI/CD in place, each change to the codebase is automatically integrated, tested, and deployed to production. This reduces the risk of human error and enables rapid, incremental updates. Additionally, it provides immediate feedback on the integration of new components with existing systems, minimizing the risk of introducing bugs during the transition.

Automated API testing is another key aspect of automation. Tools like Postman, JUnit, or REST Assured allow developers to write tests that ensure the behavior of new microservices matches that of the legacy system. These tests can validate API endpoints, check for data consistency, and ensure proper error handling before deployment. By automating these tests, teams can rapidly verify that new components are functioning correctly without manual intervention, which is critical when running legacy and modern systems in parallel.

How DreamFactory Facilitates the Strangler Pattern

DreamFactory’s API generation and management capabilities are particularly well-suited for implementing the Strangler Pattern. Here’s how:

1. Seamless Integration with Legacy Systems: DreamFactory can generate REST APIs for a wide variety of data sources, including legacy databases such as IBM DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server. This capability allows you to wrap your legacy systems in modern RESTful APIs, which can then be used to gradually replace old functionalities with new microservices. For example, a large healthcare provider used DreamFactory to wrap their aging Oracle database in a REST API, enabling them to build new, cloud-based microservices around it without disrupting ongoing operations.
2. Parallel Development Support: DreamFactory supports running the legacy system and the new system in parallel. By using DreamFactory’s API management platform, you can expose the same data from both the old and new systems via consistent APIs. This parallelism ensures that you can validate new functionalities without decommissioning the legacy system prematurely. A financial institution leveraged this feature to introduce a new customer-facing application while keeping the old system operational, allowing for a smooth transition over time.
3. Automated API Management: With DreamFactory, you can automate the creation, deployment, and management of APIs, which is critical when gradually migrating from a legacy system. DreamFactory’s ability to auto-generate APIs reduces the manual effort required to expose legacy functionalities as services. This automation was crucial for a manufacturing company that needed to modernize their production tracking system. By automatically generating APIs for both their old and new systems, they could synchronize data between them and gradually phase out their outdated software.

Three Examples of DreamFactory and the Strangler Pattern in Action

1. Healthcare Integration: A healthcare provider needed to modernize a legacy electronic health record (EHR) system. Using DreamFactory, they wrapped the legacy EHR in a REST API, enabling the development of new mobile applications that accessed patient data. As new features were added, old components of the EHR were gradually replaced with modern microservices, all while maintaining seamless access to patient data.
2. Banking System Modernization: A global bank faced the challenge of modernizing their core banking system, which was built on a decades-old mainframe. DreamFactory allowed them to expose mainframe functionalities as RESTful APIs, enabling the development of new customer-facing services. By running the old and new systems in parallel, they could test new functionalities in real-time, ensuring a smooth transition for their customers.
3. Manufacturing Process Overhaul: A manufacturing company with an outdated production tracking system needed to move to a more agile, cloud-based solution. DreamFactory was used to generate APIs for the existing system, allowing new microservices to access and update the legacy data. Over time, the new system took over more functionalities, and the old system was decommissioned without any disruption to the production process.

Architectural Patterns Supporting the Strangler Pattern

The Strangler Pattern naturally aligns with certain architectural patterns, particularly microservices architecture and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). These patterns support incremental modernization, enabling isolated, scalable, and manageable transitions from legacy systems.

Microservices Architecture

Microservices architecture is an ideal fit for the Strangler Pattern because it allows for the gradual replacement of legacy systems with small, independent services. Each microservice in this architecture is isolated, meaning it can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. This independence makes it easier to implement the Strangler Pattern, as individual components of a legacy system can be replaced one at a time without disrupting the entire system.

DreamFactory plays a critical role in this process by providing an API management platform that can expose and manage these microservices. As new microservices are introduced to replace legacy functions, DreamFactory can generate RESTful APIs for each one, enabling seamless communication between services. It also provides security, rate-limiting, and monitoring capabilities for the new APIs, ensuring that both legacy and modern systems can coexist while the transition occurs. This makes it easier to incrementally modernize complex systems, ensuring smooth integration and minimizing operational risk.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is another pattern often found in legacy systems, where services are more monolithic and rely on middleware for communication. SOA typically involves larger, tightly coupled services, which can lead to scalability and flexibility challenges. In contrast, microservices are smaller and more focused, designed to scale and evolve independently.\

Conclusion 

The Strangler Pattern is an effective approach to modernizing legacy systems, but its success hinges on having the right tools to manage the transition. DreamFactory provides the necessary API management capabilities to implement this pattern successfully, allowing companies to modernize at their own pace while minimizing risk and maintaining business continuity. Whether you’re in healthcare, banking, or manufacturing, DreamFactory can help you effectively execute the Strangler Pattern and move beyond your legacy systems.

It's time to stop talking about modernization and start doing it—DreamFactory is here to help you every step of the way.