The very first step, as we defined before, to migrate from a monolith to a collection of microservices is understanding the current system. This stage should not be underestimated. It is highly likely that no single person has a good understanding of the different components of the monolith, especially if some parts are legacy.
The objective of this phase is to determine whether a change to microservices will actually be beneficial and to get an initial idea of what microservices will be the result of the migration. As we have discussed, making the move is a big investment and should not be taken lightly. Making a detailed estimation of the effort required won't be possible at this stage; uncertainty will be big at this point, but a thousand-mile journey starts with a single step.
The effort involved will vastly depend on how structured the monolith...