How microservices can drive innovation and efficiency in the banking sector.

Support for microservices architecture in CoreBanking platforms is critically important for several reasons that contribute to the flexibility, scalability, and overall reliability of the system:

Flexibility and Development Speed: Microservices architecture allows developers to work on individual services independently, simplifying the process of making changes and adding new features. This reduces time to market and enhances the bank's ability to quickly respond to changes in market demands.

Scalability: Microservices can scale independently, allowing for resource optimization for each service based on its needs. This means resources can be allocated to more heavily utilized services without impacting less utilized parts of the system.

Fault Tolerance: In microservices architectures, a failure in one service typically does not affect the operation of other services. This increases the overall reliability and availability of the system as issues can be isolated and addressed quickly.

Technological Flexibility: Microservices can be developed using different technologies and programming languages, allowing for the use of the best tools for each specific service and fostering innovation.

Simplified Management: Since each microservice can be deployed, updated, and scaled independently, infrastructure management becomes more flexible and efficient. This also simplifies the automation of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) processes.

Resource Utilization Optimization: Microservices architecture allows for more efficient use of computational resources, as resource allocation can be precisely tailored to the needs of specific services.

Ease of Maintenance and Monitoring: Breaking down the banking platform into small microservices simplifies system maintenance and monitoring. Each microservice can be monitored separately, allowing problems to be identified and resolved more quickly and efficiently.

Ease of Integration with Other Systems: Microservices architecture facilitates easy integration with other systems, such as external services, third-party APIs, or other microservices. This makes the banking platform more flexible and easily extensible.

As a result, microservices architecture provides neobanks with significant advantages in terms of innovation speed, development efficiency, reliability, scalability of services, which are critically important for competitiveness in today's rapidly changing financial sector.

Microservices in Banking Integrations: architecture, reliability, and innovation speed

Our own experience is the best example to demonstrate how it all works.

The development of neobank was based on a microservice architecture with several methods of inter-service communication. Instead of building a giant application all at once, the microservice approach breaks it down into bite-sized pieces. Each part is a separate application that is running separately and communicates with others using a communication protocol. These applications focuses on specific functionalities and can be deployed independently, often by automated deployment tools. These mini-apps focus on specific functionalities and can be deployed independently, often by machines. They mostly manage themselves and can be built with different programming languages and data storage depending on the need.

Let's see how this can be implemented when building a neobank

Development speed: The development was based on the principle of using a mono-repository. This allowed us to gain the following advantages: 

1. The ability to reuse libraries and services between all microservices in the repository
2. Automatic generation of SDKs by each microservice. These SDKs are used by other microservices that communicate with the service that generated the SDK. Accordingly, in case of any critical changes, errors in the use of the imported SDK are visible at the development stage
3. Updating npm packages in 1 place makes it easier to maintain updates
4. Automated CI/CD allows you to quickly update microservice logic

Security: When developing microservices, we used the Saga orchestration approach. This allowed us to get 1 access point to all the functionality, which provided

1. The use of JWT authorisation allowed us to reject requests that do not meet the requirements at the receiving stage (on the orchestrator service)
2. Validation of requests at the entrance
3. Restriction of access to internal microservices. Only the orchestrator service has access from the external network. The orchestrator communicates with the rest of the services using the internal network

Scalability and reliability: The use of microservice architecture made it possible to scale only services that have a high load, and in case of a crash of one of the raised copies of the microservice, traffic was redistributed to the active copies, while the microservice that experienced problems was restarted. This also allowed the other services to continue working in case of failure of one of them.

Communication between microservices: This is organized in 2 ways:

1. using the REST API for synchronous processing of requests that require immediate results
2. using queues with the RabbitMQ broker to process large amounts of data (processing of customer transactions)

Monitoring: All microservices on the project were connected to ELK, which allows receiving, analysing, and monitoring system parameters in one place. When a service request enters the orchestrator, an internal identifier is assigned to it and transmitted to the microservices, respectively, using the logging system - you can filter the logs for this request and analyse which service is not working correctly and for what reason.

More about microservices Types of Microservices in Microservice Architecture

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