| ASSESSMENT 1 PART B BRIEF | |
| Subject Code and Title | MIS603 – Microservices Architecture |
| Assessment | Microservices Case Study - Part B |
| Individual/Group | Individual |
| Length | 2500 words (+/- 10%) |
| Learning Outcomes | The Subject Learning Outcomes demonstrated by successful completion of the task below include:
|
| Weighting | 40% |
| Total Marks | 100 marks |
Case Scenario
Greer John Wealth Management Pty Ltd is a mature company with a strong base of investment customers who trust it with their investment portfolios. Its core platform for managing its customer’s accounts and investments was built in the early 2000s and was cutting edge at the time. This monolithic platform has served both the business and customer needs well. However, changing times mean that cloud-based solutions offer it greater flexibility and agility.
Several factors have arisen that have made it clear to the executive leadership team that it needs to review its technology strategy:
The executive leadership team understands it needs to seek out new ways of meeting its customers’ needs. It is investigating a digital strategy that will allow it to steadily and incrementally transition from its old platform into a cloud-enabled solution that will be nimble and agile in responding to its customers’ digital needs.
A team of consultants has been tasked with building a suite of reports as concept briefs to address the different areas of change so that all stakeholders understand what new solutions will require.
As the microservices architecture specialist in the team, you have been tasked with writing a report about the microservices architecture component of the shift to the cloud. This is to help key stakeholders of the executive leadership team be informed what the change will mean for them.
Task Summary
You are required to research and write a 2500-word individual report in response to a case scenario. This assessment offers you an opportunity to apply the knowledge you gained about microservices architecture in Part A. You are required to use the case as context to write a report for both business and IT stakeholders explaining the advantages and disadvantages of microservices architecture and the benefits it can offer an organisation. You will need to demonstrate your ability to identify business priorities and relate relevant advantages to complex business needs through the strategy you recommend.
Context
This assessment gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of microservices architecture and your capability to explain complex technology concepts in terms that a non-IT
business leader can understand. This prepares you professionally for several roles that ‘build a bridge’ between IT and business leaders.
Task Instructions
A title page with subject code and name, assignment title, student’s name, student number, and lecturer’s name.
The introduction (250–300 words) that will also serve as your statement of purpose for the report—this means that you will tell the reader what you are going to cover in your report. You will need to inform the reader of:
The body of the report (1900–2000 words) will need to respond to the specific requirements of the case study. It is advised that you use questions posed in the case study to assist you in structuring the report by means of subheadings in the body of the report.
The conclusion (250–300 words) will summarise any findings or recommendations that the report puts forward regarding the concepts covered in the report.
1. Format of the report
The report should use font Arial or Calibri 11 point, be line spaced at 1.5 for ease of reading, and have page numbers on the bottom of each page. If diagrams or tables are used, due attention should be given to pagination to avoid loss of meaning and continuity by unnecessarily splitting information over two pages. Diagrams must carry the appropriate captioning.
2. Referencing
There are requirements for referencing this report using APA referencing style. It is expected that you reference any lecture notes used and 10 additional sources in the relevant subject area based on readings and further research.
Introduction
In this assessment task, we are researching about microservice architecture. We have provided a case study of Greer John Wealth Management Pty Ltd organization, to be used in this research. It is a wealth management company with a strong customer base who trust the company in terms of investment. Their main motive is to manage the customer account and their investments. The company it currently using a monolithic platform but they are desired to move to a clous-based solution because of its good offerings in terms of flexibility, agility and features. Their executive leadership team has reviewed the system and identify the technology upgrade requirement to meet the competition and implement changes in several wealth management product for betterment of the services and meeting new needs of customers and business. The team is now investigating to implement a new cloud-based solution that will rapidly and incrementally transfer their current system to this new platform and take the business to a new digital working environment.
Keeping these needs of the company in mind, we conduct a research and prepare a detailed report on the different areas that need to be changed to implement the new solution. We as a team of consultants, researching on the microservice architecture to develop a solution for the company. After conducting a detailed research, we are preparing this report to provide details about the microservice architecture, to Greer John Wealth management company. The report provides details about the benefits of use microservice architecture, its core elements, models, process of DevOps and the future of microservice. The information provided in this report will help in making decisions by the key stakeholders and the team of executive leadership in transiting from the current environment to a cloud-based solution (microservice architecture).
What is a microservice?
If we are desired to adapt microservices as new solution strategy for the company we need to understand what microservice is. Microservices can be defined as an architectural style which develops an application as a set of small services in which every service runs in its individual process. It is a kind of services-oriented architecture where applications are built not as a whole app but as a collection of several smaller services. These services can communicate with clients or with each other by using lightweight protocols like HTTP, APIs ("Microservices Architecture Tutorial: all you need to get started", 2020).
In microservices we have multiple separate programs that can run on their own instead of having a monolithic app. With simpler and independent programs that can execute on their own, we can build huge and complicated applications. All these smaller programs are clustered in order to provide all the functionalities to a Monolithic app. Although it requires high end skills of a developer, it can be build using various programming languages and even different platforms. Instead of having large teams developing a single monolithic app, we have smaller teams which uses frameworks and tools they are most familiar with. Each of the program involved is modified, executed and scaled separately. These microservices can communicate with other microservices and can have unique URLs or names, even when failures are encountered, while still being accessible and consistent. There are several microservices frameworks that you can use for developing for Java. Some of these are: Spring Boot, Jersey, Swagger, Restlet, Spark Framework and many more ("What are microservices?", 2020).
How microservice architecture works?
To get to know how microservices can be a great technological strategy for Greer John Wealth Management Pty Ltd we have to get familiar with the working of microservices. A Monolithic application, at first comprised of three layers which are: Presentation, Business Logic and Database. Application is a set of codes which perform a specific function.In the current monolithic architecture, presentation, database and business logical layers are touched by the user. It is an organized method to arrange an application but it also create so many single points of failure. By the time, when mobile application is popularly used by the users, client needs a cloud-based platform which offers more convenience (Atchison et al., 2020).
Today, cloud microservice disrupt down the strategy of SOA as a group of roughly functioning services. A microservice is a collection of small services which is used to provide good aptitude to update the single function code. The microservice is better deployed using containers because of its easy and quick launching technique. Owing to this feature, it is growingly use when a regular method will be failed down. Both containers and microservice architecture is compatible with each other, so these can be deployed combinedly on a single operating system. The Greer John Wealth Management company can prepare their own environment as offered by a cloud service provider to deploy and use the basic features of microservice. This method enables a company to create an environment at single location and use it anywhere according to their convenience. The implementation of microservice architectures and container technologies makes this cloud-native style probable and essential which provides great flexibility and agility.
Answer to the question
1. Here are the benefits that Greer John Wealth Management will get in transitioning from monolithic architecture to microservice architecture ("Microservices Architecture Benefits And Its Business Value | Sunflower Lab", 2020) (2020).
Adapting microservices allows company to use various customization; to make it simpler for large solutions to improve efficiency, provide application assortment versatility, and are great choice for distributed teams. Since, Microservices also has its own problems, like the architectural approach. Regularly, it can be frustrating and paralysing for organisations to use multiple languages, databases, systems and data storage technologies. But microservices are best option if you have a large project that require fast and autonomous delivery, we need to plan an effective solution that need to be upgrade as a separate part of the structure frequently.
2. Here are the key elements of service design process:
a. There are so many things to be consider when splitting the monolithic system into future microservice architecture. Here are some elements that need to be regenerate or update according to the new architecture used ("5 core components of microservices architecture", 2020 –
The Primary objective of microservices is to break the monotony of monolithic structure, it enables mobility and versatility to approach the systems. By leveraging the common microservice architecture, users are able to run applications at a lower cost and reach good density. Since each container is managed in a separate atmosphere, it accelerates the functionality, infrastructure utilization and time to market. Thus, the company will retain as a great competitor in the market.
This process involves the API exposing customers to fine-grained data. Therefore, it is important to provide a standard interface that commands the APIs for the functions of each service. When determining the SLA between the client and the provider, it is of high importance for the API to be handled with respect. For fast delivery, it becomes a requirement for a company to automate the design, documentation, and production of the API concerned.
Although microservices are stateless, there are other operations that require data services operating on a separate network. There are several measures that have to be used in when a network is chosen to maintain those service areas. The coordination and status reports are managed by the team of management to meet the business conditions. To better meet their needs, company can use auto-scaling feature. It is the responsibility of the company to monitor the service load, add instance or remove instance from the service categories.
Tracking becomes possible with an additional offloaded data layer and traffic variations often adding complications. The size and dynamic nature involve an ongoing resource that collects data at a central location and represents the changes in monitoring system's application. This form of real-time service monitoring gives the microservices a holistic place to protectively process and deploy services that create resilient and scalable business continuity solutions.
The DevOps framework maintains the automation of the development and implementation of the processes, while the microservices break the services to enable it. Both procedures are structured to provide greater stability and effectiveness for the activities of the company to function without hiccups ensuring growth of the business.
b. Here are the benefits that can be gained from service modelling in a microservice architecture ("6 Key Benefits of Microservices Architecture", 2020)(CVA, 2017)–
Microservices have highly fault tolerating capacity, since they are developed separately which means if one service fails, the other services of application will not be affected. Every separate microservice carries all its necessary resources required for its functionality where as in monolithic structure all modules are closely connected as unified block of code. In monolithic framework if a single feature crashes, it may lead to failure of entire system. It makes simpler for the company to found and isolate the problems, restricting the examination to only one element and thus reducing tenacity times.
Microservice architecture permits company to stock Data in Numerous Locations, in contrast SOA and Monolithic structures limits the data storages choices to only one venue. Although this system works fine for small Data sets but when company continue to work with bigger data and data-sets begins to take on different features, they can begin to run into some complications. Developers are free to select a storage type with a microservice architecture that best suits the needs of each service.
Deployment speeds will rise dramatically as organisations start adopting these philosophies that change internal culture and processes to automate manual processes. Diverse teams will work independently on dissimilar components, deprived of waiting to complete projects of other groups before they can move onward. QA research thus becomes easier to find, alter, and execute. Small teams can also simultaneously design, test, and deploy different components, enabling them to increase performance without appointment more peoples. This would increase the efficiency of the company.
In this new era, microservices have been developed so far that it’s now become easier to detect vulnerabilities across entire framework with zero rate of failures which increases overall productivity of the company. In addition, since each service is separated from the other components in the application, the root cause of security vulnerability is easier to monitor. Microservices saves the company from damages caused by long periods of downtime compared to monolithic systems, where all is linked. This isolation prevents the other modules in the application from being compromised by security threats, resulting in improved efficiency and saves expenses of the company.
Microservices offer the elasticity to test the new load of technology on a specific service if required. There are no such particular issues and very easy to roll back images in an ease. There are more flexible ways to work with codes which roughly aligned with scalable services in independent and in horizontal way. As, the services are separate we can easily scale the important services or set of services at any time as per needs of the company.
3. DevOps and its test and build process
DevOps is a group of peoples, procedures and products needed to deliver values to the end user, continuously. The process of DevOps includes the development and operations practices that work collectively with planning, integration and delivery and effective monitoring of the process (CVA, 2017). There is no standard process or any specific requirements to work with DevOps. But it is an incremental process and very simpler to adopt. It needs a core architecture at the beginning to develop a project. An Agile development process is needed for rapid delivery and eliminate bugs in the process of development. Automation, management of risk, continuous integration is used to deliver a project with DevOps. For testing, it has an automated process that is required for taking feedback at each phase. Integration test, functional and regression testing is used further for testing. The main goal of DevOps, is to satisfy customer need. Continue monitoring process is use to monitor the health of the applications in a production environment, to check its performance and to meet other conditions (Guidotti, 2013).
Conclusion
In this assignment, we conduct a detailed research on using the microservice architecture at Greer John Wealth Management Pty Ltd. As the organization is desired to move from their current working environment to the microservice architecture. We mainly focus on the advantages, disadvantages, architecture and the benefits the organization will have after adopting the microservice architecture. The microservice technology is most used today and an organization will have so many benefits of adopting the microservice architecture like improved fault management, faster performance, simple and secured monitoring, etc. It also has some disadvantages as its complex environment and very difficult to implement. Besides this, the organization will have many benefits like increased productivity, enhanced competitive technique, freedom of work individually and many more. So, according this our research, the organization should adopt the microservice architecture and get benefits of it.
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Pages: 4
Words: 890