MIS603 - Microservices Architecture: Whiteboard Company Report

This report assesses the microservices architecture for the Whiteboard Company, a provider of student and learning management systems. It examines the transition from a monolithic structure to microservices, discussing the architecture's features, and benefits. The report analyzes successful implementations by companies like Uber, Amazon, and Netflix, highlighting principles of service modeling, and the technologies for integration such as SOAP and REST. It also addresses the challenges of splitting a monolithic system, including increased complexity, inter-service communication, and the need for complete stakeholder buy-in. Furthermore, it covers ethical, legal, and security issues, providing recommendations to ensure a smooth transition. This comprehensive analysis aims to guide the Whiteboard Company in leveraging microservices to enhance its services to institutions and students globally.

Running head: MICRO-SERVICES ARCHITECTURE
MICRO-SERVICES ARCHITECTURE
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Executive Summary
The report deals with the Whiteboard Company that offers learning and student
management systems to 600 institutions and Universities all over the world. The Whiteboard
Company is a leading provider of student and learning management systems and supports
over 10 million students all over the world. The company has a monolithic structure in its
systems and the company wants to change the monolithic structure to microservices
architecture. The report provides an overview of the microservices architecture. The report
discusses about three companies that have successfully implemented microservices. From the
report, it can be inferred that the Whiteboard Company must deploy microservices in its
company, as it will help the company in order to split the services and then provide the
institutions and the students will excellent services.

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Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................3
Overview of Microservices Architecture...................................................................................3
Successful Implementation of Microservices............................................................................4
Netflix........................................................................................................................................5
Principles of Service Modelling.................................................................................................6
Challenges of Splitting Monolithic System...............................................................................8
Ethical, Legal and Security Issues.............................................................................................9
Recommendations......................................................................................................................9
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................12

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Introduction:
The Microservices are a technique of development of software and it is an alternative
of service oriented architecture style of structure. It arranges an application as a compilation
of services those are loosely coupled. In microservices architecture, the services in this
architecture are fine grained and the protocols of the architecture are lightweight.
The report deals with the Whiteboard Company that offers learning and student
management systems to 600 institutions and Universities all over the world. The Whiteboard
Company is a leading provider of student and learning management systems and supports
over 10 million students all over the world. The company has a monolithic structure in its
systems and the company wants to change the monolithic structure to microservices
architecture.
The report provides an overview of the microservices architecture. The report
discusses about three companies that have successfully implemented microservices. The
report provides the benefits that these companies have and the challenges of implementation
of microservices in the company. The report discusses about the principles of service
modelling and the technologies those are available for integration. The report discusses about
the challenges of splitting the backend monolithic system. Lastly, the report provides an
overview of ethical, legal and security issues in transitioning to the microservices
architecture.
Overview of Microservices Architecture
The microservices are an approach of architecture in order to build applications. As a
framework of architecture, the microservices are loosely coupled and distributed. Therefore,
one change in the team will not break the whole application. The advantage of utilising
microservices is that the teams of development are capable of rapidly develop new

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components of applications in order to meet the changing requirements of business (Balalaie,
Heydarnoori & Jamshidi, 2016).
The traditional architecture also known as the monolithic architecture provides fewer
advantages than the microservices architecture. Therefore, many businesses are transitioning
to the microservices due to its features. The features of the microservices architecture include
decoupling, componentization, autonomy, responsibility, agility and decentralized
governance (Aderaldo et al.,2017). Due to all the features, various businesses are moving to
microservices architecture from the monolithic architecture. The microservices are testable
and highly maintainable. They are also implementable independently and loosely coupled and
organized around the capabilities of business.
Successful Implementation of Microservices
Every company must implement Microservices in order to get the advantages
provided by it. Various companies have already implemented microservices. The companies
include Uber that provides taxi services to its customers, Amazon that is an E-commerce
company and it is the largest E-commerce company in the world and Netflix, which is a
streaming service that permits the members to a watch a wide range of TV shows,
documentaries and movies.
Uber
Like many of the start-ups, Uber Company began its journey by the implementation
of a monolithic architecture that is built for a single offering in a city. Uber has one codebase
and it solved the business problems of Uber. However, as Uber started expanding they were
facing severe and they implemented microservices architecture (Tyszberowicz et al.,2018). In
order to avoid the challenges that Uber was facing it deployed microservices. The major
change is that they introduced API gateway in their architecture by which all the passengers

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and the drivers connected. From the gateway of API, all the internal points are connected
such as management of the passengers, management of trip and many more. The units are
separate and they perform separate functionalities (Niu, Liu & Li, 2018). The benefits that
Uber has from microservices is that all the units are secured, the individual units perform
separate functions and do not depend on main unit, each of the microservices focuses on a
single capability of business such as the passengers management, drivers and many more.
Amazon
Amazon adopted a monolithic server when the company was opened. When the
company was on a server that was monolithic, it was tough to predict a way to meet the
demands of traffic that was fluctuating. As a result, the Amazon Company was losing money
and most of the capacity of the server was wasted during its downtimes (Salza et al.,2017).
Therefore, the company moved to Amazon Web Services and permitted Amazon to scale up
or down when it was required, minimize the durations and number of outages and save
money for the company. The microservices architecture permitted Amazon to change to
continuous implementation and now the engineers implement code every 11.7 seconds. The
advantages that microservices provided were that it helped Amazon automate its procedures
of operation and permitted them to scale its services depending on the present requirements
of the business and the traffic (Fazio et al.,2016). This resulted in an adoption of an approach
of delivery that is continuous and it permitted Amazon to create faster and implement more
flexibly.
Netflix
Like any other company, The Netflix also started its journey with monolithic
architecture. However, it also started having issues with the monolithic architecture. Netflix
escorted in a revolution around ten years ago by rewriting the applications of the company

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that execute the whole service in order to fit in an architecture of microservice (Nadareishvili
et al.,2016). This meant that every application or the code of microservice and the assets are
its own. Netflix will not share any of it with any other application. An advantage of
microservices its agility and speed of development. The engineers of Netflix got the
opportunity in order to create, test and then implement the services independently that
permitted them to create more than 30 teams that can work on various parts of the system
without waiting for each other to complete.
The companies those are discussed above are now one of the leading companies in the
world in their respective industries. This has happened due to their implementation of
microservices and the benefits provided by microservices (Jamshidi et al.,2018). The
challenges of implementing the microservices architecture in the company include:
 Managing the microservices and it is divided into several fragments
 Monitoring the architecture of microservices
 Fault-tolerance of the architecture
 Testing of the microservices architecture
Principles of Service Modelling
The service modelling is the order of business modelling and the systems of softwares for
the objective of designing and then specifying system business those are service oriented
within a wide range of paradigms and styles of architecture that includes, microservices,
service oriented architecture, cloud computing and many more (Naily et al.,2017). Any
technique of service modelling consists of language of modelling that can be applied by both
solution domain and problem domain organizations whose distinctive perspectives affect the
development lifecycle strategy of the service and the projects those are deployed utilising

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those strategy. There are various principles of service modelling that can be applied by the
Whiteboard Company. The principles include:
 Services are autonomous: Services are independent. Service must consist of autonomy to
do their capability of business depending on other services (Hasić, De Smedt &
Vanthienen, 2018). If the principle of autonomy is not met then the services will become
a client of other services making the resources of the company depending upon the
response of other services.
 Services do not share types: It is essential to keep the services of the company protected
and do not share their types especially the types of data storage. If the company allow it in
their architecture of microservices then the principle of autonomy will be misused and the
company will end up having a coupling that is hidden between the services of the
company (Rosa, Barbosa & Teixeira, 2019).
 Services do not entirely own an entity: Services own some parts of an entity and it makes
sense to do their capabilities of business. A business must split their operations into
services where they make sense to the capability of the business.
The technologies those are available for integration includes SOAP and REST. The full
form of SOAP is simple object access protocol is a protocol specification for messaging in
order to exchange structured information in the deployment of web services in the computer
networks. The purpose of SOAP is to provide neutrality, extensibility and independence. The
company can integrate the technology with the microservices for better working of the
architecture (Baresi & Garriga, 2020). Another technology that can be integrated is REST.
The full form of REST is Representational state transfer. It is a style of software architecture
that defines a sequence of constraints to be utilised for the creation of Web services. The
services of Web that conform to the architectural style of REST are called RESTful web
services. It offers interoperability between the systems of computer on the internet. It can also

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be integrated with the microservices and will be called RESTful web services for better
interoperability (Zimmermann, 2017). In this case, XML, HTML and JSON can be utilised in
order to represent the information in REST. It mainly focuses on two major things including
interface and resources. XML-RC is a sequence of implementations that permit the
functioning of software over the internet. It utilises XML in order encode and decode the
calls those are remote.
Challenges of Splitting Monolithic System
Moving from monolithic system to microservices is very important for the Whiteboard
Company, as the microservices will offer them various benefits over the Monolithic system.
It will the Company to provide the company to provide the students and the institutions with
excellent services. However, there are several challenges that the company have to face while
splitting the monolithic system. The challenges are as follows:
 Increased complexity of application: One of the biggest challenges of splitting the
monolithic system is increase in the complexity of application. The documentations will
have the services those are new as well as the points of integration (Kalske, Mäkitalo &
Mikkonen, 2017). The plans of test and the code will have to cover smaller services and
test plan every time the company manipulate the services.
 Inter-service communication and persistent data: the Communication across various
services becomes complex when the databases are separate. The procedures of
transactions become difficult, as the databases are particular to the services. The
definitions of transactions must be maintained by the service of model instead of the
storage of data that is persistent (Esposito, Castiglione & Choo, 2016).

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 Monitoring of health and debugging becomes difficult: The Company need to administer
the health of various servers. The company can no longer depend on heartbeat monitor on
the server of web to ensure the application is still executing.
 Complete buy in from all included: All the stakeholders and the developers of the
company must “buy in”. From the clients to the members of the team, everyone should
agree that splitting the monolithic system is important. The splitting is a process that is
involved and it can delay rollouts of new functionalities (Larrucea et al.,2018).
Maintenance of the system can suffer and the bugs can be introduced when the monolithic
system will be split. The company must conduct regression testing. There is increased
cost of debugging when splitting the monolithic system. Therefore, the members of the
team and the stakeholders must agree to all these.
Ethical, Legal and Security Issues
The transition to the microservice architecture can have several issues including
ethical, legal and security issues. The whiteboard company is transforming into a new
architecture and they need to recruit new employees having particular knowledge about the
new architecture and they can terminate the employees those are old. Therefore, it will create
a legal issue (Preuveneers & Joosen, 2017). The company can file a case against the company
that they are terminated wrongly from the company. The company instead of terminating the
old employees can recruit some new employees and provide training about the new
architecture. The microservices is a completely new architecture that rearchitects the entire
system is perceived as harmful by the employees as it can disrupt the operations of the
company when not working properly (Taibi, Lenarduzzi & Pahl, 2017). This can be an
ethical issue. The employees can also provide the details of the new architecture to any other
company and it can be an ethical issue of implementation. Lastly, the microservices
architecture is not completely secure and it develops a risk of data hacking. Therefore, the

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whiteboard company must properly secure the architecture in order to prevent loss of data
(Yu et al.,2019).
Recommendations
It is clear that the microservices architecture supports various platforms and devices
that work with IoT, services of cloud, mobile and many more. The organizations are
deploying microservices with various protocols such as JSON, REST. It is required for the
Whiteboard Company to efficiently move to microservices by utilising proper protocols. For
this objective, the company should divide the traditional monolithic architecture system into
microservices with the assist of skilful and talented developers and team members. This
process will not put any break in the functioning of the system that exists and restructure the
software that is outdated. For the successful division of the monolithic system, it is required
to inspect the system and identify the problems in the system. These points of issues must be
replaced by the microservices architecture. The Company should split the whole team into
smaller groups and offer autonomy of every microservice for better management of the
services. The main reason that this architecture will be deployed in the company is that this
architecture is designed particularly according to the priorities of the business and abilities.
Therefore, the company should utilise the microservices architecture efficiently. The
company should also implement it as it provides large number of benefits due to variant
features.
Conclusion
From the report, it can be inferred that the Whiteboard Company must deploy
microservices in its company, as it will help the company in order to split the services and
then provide the institutions and the students will excellent services. The report provides an
overview of the microservices architecture and the functions those are provided by the

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microservices architecture. The report discusses about the various companies that have
already implemented microservices and have benefitted from it. The companies discussed in
report include Amazon, Uber and Netflix. The problems of the company and the solution are
properly discussed in the report. The report discusses about the challenges those are faced by
the company while implementing the microservices architecture in the company. There are
various principles of service modelling. The principles of service modelling have been
thoroughly discussed in the report. The report focuses on the technology that can be
integrated with the microservices architecture. The technologies include REST, SOAP and
XML. These are important for the company. The report provides an overview of the
challenges those are faced by the company while splitting the monolithic. Various problems
have been discussed. It includes complexity of the application, communications and many
more. Therefore, the company must keep in mind while splitting the monolithic system. The
report provides a recommendation to the Whiteboard Company so that they should
implement the microservices architecture. They should implement it as it has various benefits
due to its variant features. The architecture can also be integrated with various benefits and it
will help the company in its interoperability. By implementing this architecture, the company
can provide great services to its clients.

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References
Aderaldo, C. M., Mendonça, N. C., Pahl, C., & Jamshidi, P. (2017, May). Benchmark
requirements for microservices architecture research. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 1st
International Workshop on Establishing the Community-Wide Infrastructure for
Architecture-Based Software Engineering (ECASE) (pp. 8-13). IEEE.
Balalaie, A., Heydarnoori, A., & Jamshidi, P. (2016). Microservices architecture enables
devops: Migration to a cloud-native architecture. Ieee Software, 33(3), 42-52.
Baresi, L., & Garriga, M. (2020). Microservices: The Evolution and Extinction of Web
Services?. In Microservices (pp. 3-28). Springer, Cham.
Esposito, C., Castiglione, A., & Choo, K. K. R. (2016). Challenges in delivering software in
the cloud as microservices. IEEE Cloud Computing, 3(5), 10-14.
Fazio, M., Celesti, A., Ranjan, R., Liu, C., Chen, L., & Villari, M. (2016). Open issues in
scheduling microservices in the cloud. IEEE Cloud Computing, 3(5), 81-88.
Hasić, F., De Smedt, J., & Vanthienen, J. (2018). Augmenting processes with decision
intelligence: Principles for integrated modelling. Decision Support Systems, 107, 1-
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Jamshidi, P., Pahl, C., Mendonça, N. C., Lewis, J., & Tilkov, S. (2018). Microservices: The
journey so far and challenges ahead. IEEE Software, 35(3), 24-35.
Kalske, M., Mäkitalo, N., & Mikkonen, T. (2017, June). Challenges when moving from
monolith to microservice architecture. In International Conference on Web
Engineering (pp. 32-47). Springer, Cham.

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Larrucea, X., Santamaria, I., Colomo-Palacios, R., & Ebert, C. (2018). Microservices. IEEE
Software, 35(3), 96-100.
Nadareishvili, I., Mitra, R., McLarty, M., & Amundsen, M. (2016). Microservice
architecture: aligning principles, practices, and culture. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".
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