Doesn't need to be an "and". Just getting the development/ops environments into a virtualized architecture like Docker can make a tremendous difference in a mon

Doesn't need to be an "and". Just getting the development/ops environments into a virtualized architecture like Docker can make a tremendous difference in a monolithic app. Quite often, the technical debt is due to configuration differences in manually managed environments - development, QA, and production can differ in small or large ways. I don't know how many times I've seen things like developing on Windows and deploying on Unix, or testing on a single server but deploying into a cluster. Docker (or Vagrant, or others) can fully automate provisioning and configuration, simplifying and enforcing consistency between environments. Likewise, microservices from monoliths can be done without containers. Just pick a chunk of the monolith that can be pried loose, and start with that. This can solve all sorts of problems.