Regional Gardens is starting to migrate some of its applications and services to a public cloud. Many of the technical staff have had no experience in the Cloud and are concerned about this process. You have recommended to Regional Gardens management that they should consider the use of microservices as part of their application architecture. Regional Gardens now want you to redesign one of their monolithic applications as a microservice application 

Regional Gardens has an old and image processing application. This is used by a number of Regional Gardens customers to upload images of existing gardens to be used for a garden redesign. Regional Gardens create the new design for each customer and supply it to them when complete. The application has a number of modules as shown in Figure 1, below. Some of these modules may not need any development work done on them for long periods of time as their functions and outputs are relatively stable. Other modules though can be modified quite frequently as changes occur in the Industry. Other modules experience great peaks in workload which often slows services to Regional Gardens customers.  

Figure 1: Regional Gardens Image Processing Application architecture

1. You are to assess each of the modules shown in Figure 1 above, and determine:

1. Which modules are likely to be relatively stable, together with the reasons for this categorization,
2. Which modules are likely to require frequent modification, together with the reasons for this categorization,
3. Which modules are likely to experience workload peaks, together with the reasons for this categorization.

2. Regional Gardens wants to transition to a microservice approach with the Image Processing Application. But they want to move in a phased approach so that they can handle the workload peaks first.  

1. Which modules should be refactored first?
2. Discuss how a move to a microservice approach for these modules would resolve issues around workload peaks?

3. Discuss how a move to a microservice approach will improve Regional Gardens’ ability to maintain high availability for this application. 

4. Draw a diagram that shows the architecture of the  Image Processing Application after the transition to a microservice approach.