The Chestburster is an antipattern that occurs when transitioning from a monolith to services. 

The team sees an opportunity to exact a small piece of functionality from the monolith into a new service, but the monolith is the only place that handles security, permissions and composition.

Because the new service can’t face clients directly, the Chestburster hides behind the monolith, hoping to burst through at some later point.

The Chestburster begins as the inverse of the Strangler pattern, with the monolith delegating to the service instead of the new service delegates to the monolith.  

Why it’s appealing

The Chestburster’s appeal is that it gets the New Service up and running quickly.  This looks like progress!  The legacy code is extracted, possibly rewritten, and maybe better.

Why it fails

There is no business case for building the functionality the new service needs to burst through the monolith.  The functionality has been rewritten.  It’s been rewritten into a new service.  How do you go back now and ask for time to address security and the other missing pieces?  Worse, the missing pieces are usually outside of the team’s control; security is one area you want to leave to the experts.

Even if you get past all the problems on your side, you’ve created new composition complexities for the client.  Now the client has to create a new connection to the Chestburster and handle routing themselves.  Can you make your clients update?  Should you?

Remember The Strangler

If you want to break apart a monolith, it’s always a good idea to start with a Strangler. If you can’t set up a strangle on your existing monolith, you aren’t ready to start breaking it apart.

That doesn’t mean you’re stuck with the current functionality!

If you have the time and resources to extract the code into a new service, you have the time and resources to decouple the code inside of the monolith.  When the time comes to decompose into services, you’ll be ready.

Conclusion

The chestburster gives the illusion of quick progress; but quickly stalls as the team runs into problems they can’t control.  Overcoming the technical hurdles doesn’t guarantee that clients will ever update their integration.

Success in legacy system replacement comes by integrating first, and moving functionality second.  With the chestburster you move functionality first and probably never burst through.