In the world of complex IT estates, the limitations of monolith systems have become increasingly apparent. These legacy environments, characterised by tightly coupled components and a lack of flexibility, pose challenges for businesses seeking agility and faster time to market. However, with the emergence of headless architecture, a new approach is revolutionising the way we design and build software systems.
Monolithic systems are notorious for their lack of flexibility. Adding new features or modifying existing ones often requires extensive changes to the entire system. This rigidity hampers agility and makes it difficult to adapt to evolving business needs.
With monolithic architecture, deploying updates and introducing new functionality is a time-consuming process. The need for extensive regression testing and the risk of impacting other components within the monolith can lead to delayed releases and a sluggish time to market.
Making changes to a monolith system often involves significant development and testing efforts. This results in higher costs and longer turnaround times for addressing change requests from stakeholders or incorporating user feedback.
The integration layer allows for greater flexibility as new business flows can be built without modifying or customizing the legacy systems. Instead, businesses can simply create new orchestrations within the integration layer, which is typically five times faster than modifying the monolithic system.
With the ability to independently develop and deploy new features within the integration layer, businesses can accelerate their time to market. Updates and enhancements can be rolled out quickly, without the need for extensive regression testing across the entire monolith.
The headless approach reduces the cost of change requests by eliminating the need for extensive modifications to the monolithic system. This streamlines development efforts and allows resources to be allocated more efficiently.
By decoupling the front-end applications from the monolith, businesses can adopt a more agile release cycle. They can release updates, new features, and improvements independently, enabling them to respond rapidly to market demands and stay ahead of the competition.
We have been applying this approach to many organisations, and across many industry sectors. When approaching a new Client, we usually organise the project in four phases: Phase 1: Current landscape understanding and solution blueprinting Phase 2: Piloting on a subset of functionalities and A/B testing Phase 3: MVP development, production ready and Phase 4: Complete migration to the new infrastructure.