Strangling the monolith without strangling the business

Big-bang rewrites fail more often than they succeed. The strangler-fig pattern offers a safer path: route traffic through a façade and replace capabilities one by one.

Choose seams carefully. The best first candidates are capabilities with high change frequency and clear data ownership.

Data is the hardest part. Plan for change data capture, dual writes or event sourcing to keep old and new in sync during transition.

Measure success by business outcomes — release frequency, incident rates and cost — not by lines of code migrated.