Phalcon to Laravel, module by module
An incremental migration of a multi-tenant operations platform: no big-bang switch, no rewrite from scratch, and 60 percent lower latency.
60%lower latency
PHP 8.4up from PHP 7.4
Phalcon 5.9up from Phalcon 3.4
The situation
The platform ran on a legacy Phalcon system. It could not scale, and specialist developers for the framework were hard to find. A rewrite was out of the question: the system runs its customers' daily operations, so a big-bang switch was too risky.
The approach
- The Strangler Fig pattern: a thin PHP layer lets the old Phalcon code and the new Laravel code run side by side. Parts of the application move over one at a time, each step small enough to verify on its own.
- The runtime came along: PHP 7.4 to 8.4 and Phalcon 3.4 to 5.9, so the platform stayed in support while the migration went on.
- Every release small, every release with a rollback. A wrong assumption could only break one thing, never the whole platform.
The result
- The customers kept working in the platform during the whole migration.
- 60 percent lower latency.
- A supported runtime, and a codebase on a framework that developers actually know.
Technology
PHP, Laravel, Phalcon, MySQL, Docker, Ansible, GitHub Actions. The client is anonymized and the work is covered by confidentiality.
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