“Microservices, or microservice architecture, is an approach to application development in which a large application is built as a suite of modular components or services.” These services run as autonomous processes and communicate with one another with, you guessed it, APIs.
Microservices are not just beloved by fintechs such as Alacriti and PayPal. They’re also used by giants such as Amazon and Netflix (who run on Amazon AWS cloud servers). You may have seen that microservices provide flexibility. But how? Upgrading a solution traditionally means doing a lot of re-testing for all aspects of the solution. Microservices allow developers to make targeted changes that have their own pathways, making large re-testing unnecessary. Another welcome benefit is that changes can be made (think enhancements and regulatory demands) without worrying about downtime or the entire solution malfunctioning.
Teamwork is typically a good thing. However, you don’t necessarily want to have your entire IT team working on your solution every time a change is needed. In fact, different teams can work on different components at the same time, rather than having the dreaded project management dependency. Everyone on your team doesn’t have to know the entire solution. Each microservice can be implemented with different databases, software environments, and programming languages. Each service can be managed independently, and one thing changing doesn’t affect the rest of the system.
As we mentioned in Lesson 1, a full API strategy focuses on microservices-based architecture. This allows you to add capabilities without everything breaking. A perfect example of that is real-time payments. As the demand for faster payments increases, many financial institutions are offering or planning to offer real-time payments. Microservices and open APIs make launching real-time payments without disruption possible. Microservices are the key to digital acceleration and the flexibility to keep pace with the industry.
Alacriti offers an API First and Microservices based architecture on a cloud-based platform, Orbipay, with solutions for real-time payments, EBPP, and digital disbursements. This provides a flexible integration framework to enable easy integration with internal systems (core banking, fraud, risk management, etc.), and your organization can easily add support for new payment schemes as they become available.
To speak with an Alacriti payments expert, please contact us at (908) 791-2916 or info@alacriti.com.
