Tag: #MicroService

Real World Implication of Microservices in the Fintech Industry

The transformation of the monolithic architecture to microservices architecture is one of the most heroic steps that you might take to upswing your business. So, if you are really looking forward to scale your infrastructure and also speed up while deflecting high supervision costs then microservices is the right solution. 

Especially, in a FinTech ecosystem that is running to establish itself in the digital centric world. And this being the reason that they are experimenting their digital approaches with highly scalable, flexible, and efficient architectures for their infrastructures. To get an outcome of performing well in the competition; and also satisfying and solving their customers’ issues.  

The outmost benefit of Microservices Architecture is its capability to provide flexibility, structural scalability, and reduced costs. The Monolithic structure has often failed when you want to scale your architecture. And since, financial services can never remain constant there is always scope to extend its capabilities as the world is changing. 

The long before financial institutions have legacy systems that carry the baggage of centralized database that are tightly coupled sub system. Microservices give them an approach to separate database from every services. Whenever a new service or a feature is deployed in an infrastructure or product then it has its own separate database and this way entire system doesn’t get affected. The architecture offers solution to fetch the only required data belonging to a specific service. The service reflects through an endpoint or a middleware platform, implying that a large scale service can be implemented with No SQL database for heavy scenarios. 

Example of a real life Bank with Monolithic architecture:

Danske Bank worked on the monolithic architecture that mostly relied on the sharing of the resources and therefore the processes couldn’t function independently. The major issue with the monolithic architecture was its scalability and maintainability. Their system wasn’t componentized and shared software libraries. Also monolithic architecture has stack dependencies that stops the embedment of the latest technologies. Additionally, with this architecture banking application had the fear of sending over unencrypted data of the users. 

Monolithic application involves huge and complex code, making the response time of a web application high, and also, unacceptable.

And as the web service coincides with the monolith ecosystem, they have a greater downtime and are unavailable each time there is an integration or upgradation of new feature in the application. Which states that the B2B dependency on the application can further complicate decision-making.   

Example of a real life Fintech organization having Microservice architecture:

Monzo Bank, a London Based bank uses microservices architecture to build a mobile first U.K digital bank. It has established a cloud native mobile-first digital bank while also complying with regulations. It has the technology foundation that can provide what all the traditional banks cannot  with an additional cloud enabled advantage. 

Monzo uses AWS hosting for its core banking needs to enable scalability and flexibility with its cloud computing strength, also eliminating the doubts in terms of capacity, infrastructure, and provisioning management. 

Monzo has established its core banking systems from scratch with the help of microservices architecture, with multiple virtualized servers having container tools such as Docker and Kubernetes. It architecture makes a hub of small elements that can scale as an entity, communicate synchronously or asynchronously, and have APIs. Their banking application also has a platform-agnostic for easy interoperability. 

Outcome of adopting such a system

  1. Monzo runs on an active data centre that avoid any failures or downtime attached to their banking application
  2. Its AWS hosting offers sophisticated security, auditability, and encryption levels to remain compliant with the banking regulations. 
  3. Their customer experience is powered by technology making them, by far the most significant is customer centricity; elevating and enhancing their infrastructure according to the competitive landscape for FinTech organizations today.
  4. Their core banking system has a technology architecture that is open, agnostic, scalable, secure, and 3rd Platform–enabled.
  5. As a startup it always had the advantage to develop its infrastructure from scratch and be totally cloud driven.  From the very start they understood that simple computation won’t take them out of the firewall but rather give them a data driven and secure architecture that can totally redesign their system’s infrastructure.

The biggest benefit Monzo has gained from microservices is organisational flexibility, Suhail Patel, Monzo’s backend engineer explained this by quoting – 

“We build services which are granular enough to be easily understood. Ownership of services is well-defined but can be fluid based on the goals of the company. Monzo has grown significantly over the past 24 months; the structure of existing teams and emergence of new teams has changed significantly as a result.”

Benefits of inducing Microservices in financial institutions 

There are considerable advantages that microservices can provide with a robust IT strategy that is sufficient for smooth transition. 

  • Transmission and redeployment of new application features without fear of failing the entire application.
  • Increased agility and decoupled release cycles implying app updates can be developed and deployed within hours.
  • With microservices architecture the infrastructure can be easily replicated and can be more effectively help in scaling growth in terms of users and transaction volumes. 
  • As database is much less interdependent, microservices can level down failure footprint. 
  • Microservices architecture makes banking application easier to refactor or replace going forwards.
  • As microservices can be easily replicated it can help increase structural scalability. 
  • Microservices architecture helps provide improved security levels in the application this way the threats do not breach the entire app and the other elements can left protected. 

Microservices Architecture – Ideal platform for Platform Banking 

Microservice architecture provides accelerated integration with the third parties and efficiency in the process, which proves to be a major competitive factor in the platform banking ecosystem. The traditional banking system that goes with the monolithic approach has multiple points of integrations and batch processing which is highly inefficient and slows the entire process. And the microservices architecture can bring in a phased approach that minimises risk with a deliberate process in the near-term and long-term objectives. Each element can be developed, updated, and managed independently, making microservices based applications easier to work on and maintain. 

To Conclude

Banks and Financial Institutes must adopt microservices architecture in order to create and enter new markets, and also establish themselves rightly to gain all the profits that a new market can offer. With the platform banking the FinTech industry will not only introduce new sources of revenue, but also present enhanced customer experience along with the improved operational efficiency reciprocating a lot of margin. 

Also, in the long-term, banks and financial institutes must move to a more sophisticated microservices based core platform in coordination with service mesh. Banks are currently trying to develop a marketplace that should have a microservices platform providing and scaling banking services as individual stacks categorized by product domains.

Consider this example, an organization owner can develop a marketplace that can combine industry leading onboarding services from a fintech with its inhouse underwriting capabilities and book the receivables to a third party bank. And also a customer availing a loan from their platform would be able to protect from the various levels in the back end. Such a composition can be executed effectively only with a microservices-based architecture. 

So, the goal of microservices architecture is to help financial institutes and banks align together services from different platforms into unity to offer a unique service to customers.

To know more about iView Labs, kindly log on to our website www.iviewlabs.com and to get in touch with us with your queries and needs just write us an email on info@iviewlabs.com and sales@iviewlabs.com. Download the latest portfolio to see our work.

9 key points to decide on Microservices Architecture

Microservices Architecture is a great way to structure your single monolithic codebases. It gives an opportunity to scale the architecture, giving you complete portability of an application. But before going through all the benefits of microservices, it is important that we understand the key points of Microservices Architecture in order to get the maximum value out of the entire structure.

Best practices to include while implementing Microservices Architecture 

  1. Why Microservices Architecture?

First, identify the need whether micro services architecture for your cloud application development is going to be really beneficial or not. The biggest advantage of microservices is the way it disintegrates  data and operations. This distributed system will  help to partition all your data into different services. This gives an option to scale the system along with the data that needs to be prescribed independently so that the service logic is separate. You will need to identify whether such separation of data, components and services which  brings scalability  is really required for your product, use case or a business application on cloud..

  1. Resources

Each unit in the application runs with its own runtime and different processing threads giving it a better elasticity than the monolithic architecture. If you need such elasticity and scale, you will have to plan your resources, separating data; teams separated, leading to efficient ways of managing  each service independently irrespective of resources.

  1. Define the kind of microservices 

The success of microservices architecture is mainly on  how you design, define and architect this system. Before implementing it is important to clearly understand your business function, your use case, your modules,, services, and to understand how these different modules will interchange and exchange data into each other. A clarity on your business function is important to define the architecture that subsides in the system with fragmentation. So, remember to recognize your business functionality far ahead to build optimal microservice architecture.

  1. Recognizing Scalability of your Structure 

Scalability being the major aspect of microservices, it allows an application to be broken down into units and then concurrently being processed in parallel. Thereafter, increasing the overall efficiency of the application. So, while inducing scalability identify these aspects in your system – resource bottlenecks for read and write traffic.

Start by knowing and understanding the nature of growth your system would have. Assess this on predetermined data or put your assumptions to design a system with a performance benchmark to understand it’s  qualitative growth scale. Thereafter is the capacity planning, this is where quantitative and qualitative growth comes into play. Next is dependency scaling; You need to understand the interdependent scenarios which could lead to bottlenecks for fetching and writing data into your databases. This is where a well defined decoupled module would help to bring that scale for your system.

  1. Ensuring Cost Vs Benefit 

All in all, Microservices Architecture transformation will lead to an independent management of services which will give your application an agility that will facilitate continuous delivery and faster time to market. Ofcourse, initially when you are building with a microservices architecture, it will take time and cost of it will increase but you build your systems with a mindset of modernization and to sustain for the future  for at least for 5 years.  Implementing the microservice architecture isn’t only a technical decision this kind of transformation also requires a buy-in from the stakeholders into account to ensure that any system that you are  building is able to sustain. So, before your monolithic architecture is transformed into microservices or needs to be modernized we need to understand what are the benefits it’s going to bring for the system in the longer run. 

  1. A good set of DevOps toolkit

To get an optimal value out of your new architecture you need to automate your services testing, build and deploy management. Therefore it is important to set up a good set of DevOps process as you will find it faster to release your application. 

  1. A single entry point

Implement an API Gateway which is  a single entry point for all the requests of your client. Since in microservices architecture, each service is managed independently, from its authentication, business logic and database, we need a common gateway to interact with different services of the system. This helps in distributing your client requests separately for each service. Also, it gives an advantage to host and request each service of your application differently.  The communication protocol between your product and services should be as simple as possible and it would be incharge of transmitting the data without changing it. Microservice architectures have the capability to keep data or resources as straightforward as possible to avoid tight coupling of the elements. In some opportunities you might find yourself using an event driven architecture with asynchronous message wise communications.

  1. Keep in mind the challenges

We know microservices can provide you great benefits from decoupling, fragmentation, flexibility to scalability. But you can come across various challenges when you work on it as a whole system. As your system is divided into distributed systems it can now have multiple bottleneck points, so you need to take in account the multiple bottlenecks points. Along with it you also need to understand network hops it may have due to fragmented services. Hence the question is whether my application really needs a microservices architecture.

  1. Reduce Deployment Friction

Microservices can sustainably support continuous delivery as you have an increasing number of services that need to be deployed multiple times a day. So it is critical that you go with continuous delivery to minimize the risks of release failure, as well as ensuring that your resources are focused on building and running the application rather than being stuck at the deployment stage. 

The biggest commercial Advantage that Microservice Architecture provides: 

The biggest advantage is that microservices give an opportunity to scale, to manage, to integrate independently which helps to bring agility in your application. Also, with decoupling, it gives you a possibility to scale each service independently. We would highly recommend Micro services architecture for applications which have third party API integrations, Internal multiple Business logic  scenarios, Multiple product offerings where there is a way to scale, manage and integrate each service module independently.

To know more about iView Labs, kindly log on to our website www.iviewlabs.com and to get in touch with us with your queries and needs just write us an email on info@iviewlabs.com and sales@iviewlabs.com. Download the latest portfolio to see our work.