AWS first introduced the preview of AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces, a new capability of AWS Migration Hub, last November at re:Invent 2021. Now, the public cloud provider announced the general availability of the Migration Hub capability.
AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is the starting point for incremental application refactoring to microservices in AWS. It helps reduce the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building and operating AWS infrastructure for incremental refactoring.
When evolving applications into microservices or extending existing applications with new features written in microservices, developers can use Refactor Spaces. It simplifies the refactoring by:
- Reducing the time it takes to set up a refactoring environment.
- Reducing the complexity of refactoring monoliths by extracting capabilities as new microservices iteratively and re-routing traffic from old to new (using the Strangler Fig Pattern).
- Simplifying the management of existing apps and microservices as a single application with flexible routing control, isolation, and centralized management.
- Helping dev teams achieve and accelerate tech and deployment independence by simplifying development, management, and operations while apps change.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/migration-hub/features/?nc=sn&loc=2#Incremental_app_refactoring
Sébastien Stormacq, a principal developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, stated in the News blog post how Refactor Spaces helps:
AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces takes care of the heavy lifting for me. First, it lays down the networking infrastructure to enable connectivity between multiple AWS accounts. Second, it creates and manages a mechanism to route API calls away from my legacy application.
By orchestrating AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Resource Access Manager, and virtual private clouds, the Refactor Spaces environment simplifies cross-account networking (VPCs). It connects AWS accounts to allow older and newer services to communicate while maintaining the independence of separate AWS accounts.
Furthermore, Refactor Spaces simulates the Strangler Fig pattern for incremental refactoring. A Refactor Spaces application orchestrates Amazon API Gateway, Network Load Balancer, and resource-based AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, allowing developers to add new services to an external HTTP endpoint invisibly. Also, they can route traffic to the new services incrementally - keeping underlying architecture changes from being visible to the application's users.
Currently, AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is in ten AWS Regions (US East [N. Virginia], US West [Oregon], US East [Ohio], Asia Pacific [Singapore], Asia Pacific [Sydney], Asia Pacific [Tokyo], Europe [Ireland], Europe [Frankfurt], Europe [London], and Europe [Stockholm]) and more coming soon. Furthermore, customers are charged based on how many hours they run their refactor environments, API requests to Refactor Spaces, and any costs associated with provisioned resources. More details on pricing are available on the pricing page.