Breaking Up A Monolithic Architecture In Preparation For Supporting A Cloud Native Platform

OnScale is a recently acquired technology Software as a Service (SAAS) company that provides a hosted cloud native platform for customers to be able to access HPC resources through a plethora of endpoints made possible by a monolithic architecture. To allow the architecture to support onboarding of additional ANSYS products, the platform needed to grow horizontally, providing what are known as the 6 tenets of a distributed system: Scalability, Resource Sharing, Openness, Concurrency, Fault Tolerance, and Transparency. This article focuses on the each of the six tenets, the associated benefits, and how the OnScale platform team is currently addressing each of these to host these new Application Programming Interfaces (API). The approach the platform team utilized followed the Strangler Fig Pattern, which allowed the new microservices to slowly grow functionality while maintaining the original architecture intact, until the new functionality completely replaced the old endpoints. Mature Amazon Web Services have been utilized in this article. Selecting a new database structure and the criteria for selection are discussed at length. The results of creating a separate microservice architecture for handling account services was created and results of the decomposition are given.