ANT Forum

Hey guys, how do you actually handle the whole custom architecture dilemma when you're moving some crusty old legacy system to something more cloud-native?
Last year we had this ancient monolith (java + oracle everywhere) and I really wanted to go heavy on microservices + event sourcing because it looked sexy on paper… but in the end we kind of chickened out and did a very conservative strangler + some containers + little bit of serverless.
Still not sure whether we played it too safe or actually made the only sane decision.
What’s your usual gut feeling / decision framework in these situations?      

Funny thing I started noticing the last 2–3 years — almost every team I talk to, no matter the size, ends up apologizing for their final architecture at some point during the project. Either “we split too much”, or “shit, maybe we should’ve split more”, or “yeah we know it looks weird but it was the least bad option at that exact moment”. Feels like there is no clean victory story in this field anymore, just different flavors of reasonable compromises that everyone quietly regrets a little bit later.      

I’ve been through that exact same mental wrestling a few times already. Most often I end up somewhere in the middle too — not full “microservices-everything-now!!!” but also not just lift-and-shift with a new logo. Usually we keep the strangler pattern but try to carve out at least 2–4 reasonably independent pieces that can live on their own and give us real breathing room later. What helps me a lot personally is doing very honest “what-if-we-fuck-this-up” conversations early. Sounds dumb but it normally brings the most realistic architecture choices out. Btw when I want to read how other people approach similar migrations I quite like checking out articles on syndicode they normally show pretty down-to-earth reasoning without too much marketing fluff.