Microservices Architecture: Whiteboard Company Transition Report

This report provides a detailed analysis of microservices architecture, focusing on its implementation within the Whiteboard company. It begins with an introduction to microservices, highlighting their role in modern software design and their advantages over monolithic systems. The report then presents three successful case studies: Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Spotify, detailing their respective implementations, benefits, and challenges. Following this, the core principles of service modeling are discussed, along with an overview of relevant technologies such as SOAP, REST, and XML-RPC. The challenges associated with splitting monolithic backend systems are evaluated, encompassing both technical and organizational aspects, as well as ethical, legal, and security considerations. The report concludes with specific recommendations for the Whiteboard company, offering guidance on how to successfully transition to a microservices architecture, supported by the insights gained from the case studies and theoretical foundations. The report aims to assist the Whiteboard company in adopting a more efficient and scalable IT infrastructure.

Running head: MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE
Microservices Architecture
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Abstract:
The main aim of this report is assisting the Whiteboard company in the implementation of
microservice architecture within their organization. In this report extensive discussion has
been done regarding various of aspects of the microservice architecture. In the first section of
this report, three successful case scenarios of the microservice architecture implementation
has been discussed. Following section of this report has discussed the principles of the
service modelling and the important technologies related with it. Challenges regarding the
splitting the backend monolithic system of the Whiteboard company has been evaluated.
Lastly, important recommendation has been also shared regarding the implementation of
microservice architecture on Whiteboard company.

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Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................3
Example of Successful Implementation of the Microservice Architecture:..............................4
Microservice Architecture in Walmart:.................................................................................4
Implementation of Microservice Architecture in Coca Cola:................................................5
Microservice Integration in Spotify:......................................................................................6
Principles of Service Modelling and Technologies:..................................................................8
SOAP:....................................................................................................................................8
REST:.....................................................................................................................................9
XML-RPC:.............................................................................................................................9
Challenges in Splitting the Backend Monolithic Systems:........................................................9
Technical Challenges:............................................................................................................9
Organizational Challenges:..................................................................................................10
Ethical, Legal and Security Issues in the Transiting to Microservice Architecture:................10
Conclusion:..............................................................................................................................11
Recommendation:....................................................................................................................11
References:...............................................................................................................................12

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Introduction:
In the current aspect, the whiteboard company is the one of the leading learning and
student management system provider and it has the capability of supporting over 10 million
students worldwide. Here, the Chief Technology Officer of the Whiteboard company has
decided to overhaul their current strategy of technology and the IT delivery team’s
management so that they become capable of providing a reliable learning and student
management systems to more than 600 institutions and universities all over the world. The
provided system of the Whiteboard company will be able to manage the entire lifecycle of a
student. These functionalities will include student enrolment, student recruitment, payment of
tuition fees, academic record management of the student, management of the learning content
and it will also provide graduation and qualification related certificates. In the current state a
complete restructuring will be done and the whole organization will be shifted towards the
microservice based approach to the monolithic system.
A microservice architecture is quite same with the approach of loosely coupled
services. This type of services can be deployed, developed and can be maintained in
independent way (Alshuqayran, Ali & Evans, 2016). Each of the services in the microservice
architecture is responsible for the discrete tasks. All the services can also communicate with
each other through a simple API. This type of solution is mainly used for solving a complex
business-related problem. The microservice architecture utilizes the libraries. From the last
decade, the microservice architecture has become the way of designing the software
applications mainly due to the reason of independent deployable services (Nadareishvili et
al., 2016). There is some common type of characteristics of microservice architecture which
are intelligence at the endpoints, automated deployment and decentralized control of data and
languages.

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Example of Successful Implementation of the Microservice Architecture:
The microservice architecture is not entirely a new thing to the market. From the past
cases it can be seen that there are various of organizations which implemented the
microservice architecture within their organization successfully which also benefitted their
organizations from different type of perspectives. In the following section three case studies
of successful implementation of the microservice architecture is discussed which will justify
the reason of taking the microservice architecture approach.
Microservice Architecture in Walmart:
Walmart is one of the well-known organizations in the world which implemented the
microservice architecture in their organization. Walmart was having several types of issues
with their old architecture and this issue reflected harshly when Walmart Canada’s IT
department failed regarding the Black Friday sales two years in row. They failed to handle
about six million page viewers per minute and due to this this reason, they failed to maintain
any type of positive experiences for the users (Goel & Nayak, 2019). After observing this
issue in their old aging architecture, Walmart finally decides to replace their legacy system in
2012 with the microservice architecture. Walmart wanted to ready for the upcoming future
for their organization and for that they decided to completely replace the existing architecture
with the microservice architecture. After successful implementation of the microservice
architecture, Walmart noticed several of benefits within their organization. The main benefit
that Walmart achieved due to the implementation of microservice architecture are the:
 Conversions were improved by 20% after the immediate implementation of the
microservice architecture.
 There were nearly 40% computing related power saving for Walmart and overall,
there was 20% to 50% cost saving (Schäffer et al., 2018).

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 The main issue of downtime during the Black Friday sales were solved.
 Walmart observed a 98% of instant growth in the mobile order section.
 Walmart was also able save a large amount of money from their operational cost.
Though there was several of benefits of implementing microservice architecture, it
was never easy for them to implement this architecture. The main challenges that Walmart
faced during the implementation are the:
 The main challenge Walmart faced was regarding the fault tolerance. The fault
tolerance is one of the critical issues that is faced during the implementation of the
microservice architecture (Classon, 2019). This issue mainly occurs due to the
complexity of the microservice architecture.
 Another challenge that Walmart faced during microservice architecture
implementation is transition of function to the microservice architecture. Various of
small component is created by the microservice architectures and to transition in this
type of architecture a constant communication is required. Walmart faced this issue
during the transition stage of microservice architecture.
Implementation of Microservice Architecture in Coca Cola:
Coca Cola is another organization which chosen to implement the microservice
architecture in their organization. Coca Cola is having a large business all over the world and
they are having subsidiaries in almost every county. As the business size of Coca Cola was
huge, they were having difficulties in establishing connection among their business entities
from different countries. Due to this they were failing to achieve their projected growth. For
this reason, IT department of the Coca Cola decided to implement microservice architecture
and APIs to solve the current situation (Hannousse & Yahiouche, 2020). Coca Cola followed

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the Dev-Ops model and implemented the microservice architecture. After the implementation
of the microservice architecture the main benefits that Coca Cola achieved are the:
 Speed and agility in the organization were the main benefit that were achieved by
Coca Cola by the implementation of microservice architecture.
 Also, the newly implemented system helped Coca Cola to reduce the overall data flow
within their network by 50% (Masuda, 2018). All the operations regarding the scaling
up the support took a relatively small amount time compared with the past legacy
system of Coca Cola.
Similar with the Walmart, Coca Cola also faced some specific type of challenges
during the implementation of the microservice architecture. The main challenges that were
faced by Coca Cola during that time were the:
 At the time of adding new services to the microservice architecture Coca Cola faced
an important issue. As the new services were including in the architecture Coca Cola
were facing challenges regarding maintaining and configure monitoring of the new
services.
 Another important challenge that Coca Cola faced is regarding developing proper
security of the applications (Masuda & Viswanathan, 2019). Proliferation of the
services within the microservice architecture is quite a soft target for the hackers. So,
it was challenging for Coca Cola to implement proper security measures for the
implemented services.
Microservice Integration in Spotify:
Spotify is a well-known online music streaming organization and it is currently active
at various countries in the world. Spotify was able to anticipate that the market is getting
highly competitive with time and due to this reason, some specific type of architecture was

7MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE
required which be scaled as per the requirement. Spotify is having a large number of active
users all around the world and on an average the active session length for a user is near about
20 minutes. Thus, it is highly complex business situation for the Spotify. Spotify was aware
that in future they might need to serve more than 100 million users. So, to become
futureproof for this type of situations Spotify decided to implement the microservice
architecture so that were able to scale the required component independently (Taibi,
Lenarduzzi & Pahl, 2020). Here, the Spotify prepared a microservice architecture with
autonomous full stack team. The operations of these teams were autonomous and the main
aim of these teams were not overlapping with the mission of other teams. In the current
aspect, with the implementation of microservice architecture Spotify has successfully
managed around 600 developers and 90 teams with minimal amount of dependency among
each other. Several of important benefits has been achieved by Spotify with the
implementation of microservice architecture. The main benefits achieved by Spotify is
discussed below.
 By microservice architecture the overall number of system failures has been reduced
by a large margin and these failures are barely able to impact the overall
organizational operations of Spotify.
 Now, Spotify can easily down a large number of services for the cost saving purposes
and users will not be able observe any changes in the system (Taibi, Lenarduzzi &
Pahl, 2018).
 Due to the implementation of microservice architecture system is always ready to
serve flawlessly even if there is any type of service failure.
Spotify has also observed some of the important challenges due to the implementation
of microservice architecture. The main challenges that were faced by the microservice
architecture is discussed in the following section.

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 At the time of microservice architecture implementation it was important for Spotify
to add a high number of microservices and due to this reason, there was an important
challenge. Spotify faced a huge complexity regarding scaling all the microservices
together which was an important issue in this case.
 Spotify was having facilities in several countries in the world, but to implement the
microservice architecture it was important for the development team to work closely
otherwise the overall implementation will be failed (Ma et al., 2018). Due to this
requirement Spotify again faced an important challenge regarding microservice
architecture implementation.
Principles of Service Modelling and Technologies:
The five core principles of service modelling are the customer centric, co-creative,
sequencing, holistic and evidencing. There are several of technologies are available for the
integration purpose of the microservice architecture which includes SOAP, REST and XML-
RPC. In the following section these are discussed.
SOAP:
The SOAP which is also known as the Simple Object Access Protocol is a specific
type of architectural concept which was developed in 1998. The main developers of this
protocol were Don Box, Dave Winer and Bob Atkinson (Raj, Kumar & Devi, 2020). This
protocol was developed in collaboration with the Microsoft. This protocol was designed
explicitly due to the reason of making communication among web services easy. The SOAP
is very much famous due to the four important factors which are the independent, neutrality,
extensibility and handling of large data.

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REST:
The REST stands for Representational State Transfer which was developed in 2000.
The REST was developed by Roy Fielding. The SOAP was developed with the aim of
becoming a complete system while the REST was developed for a more lightweight option so
that some important factors can be included in the design (Schneider et al., 2019). These
factors are the portability, scalability and extensibility. These factors were the main reason
for the success of REST.
XML-RPC:
In the term ‘XML-RPC’ the ‘RPC’ stands for Remote Procedure Call. The XML-RPC
is another important aspect of the microservice architecture. RPC is a specific mechanism
that is used for calling a procedure on remote system. In microservice architecture the XML-
RPC is the most foolproof and simplest web service approach which makes easy for the
remote system to call the procedures on some other system (Astrid & Karyono, 2016).
Mainly, in the microservice architecture the XML-RPC is used for integrating multiple
computing environment. The main advantage is that through this complex data structures
need not to be shared directly as the XML-RPC will establish the communication easily and
quickly.
Challenges in Splitting the Backend Monolithic Systems:
While splitting the backend monolithic systems will be done for transitioning into the
microservice architecture, there will be several of challenges. For the Whiteboard company
this is also the same and they also need to face several of challenges in the transition process.
The main challenges are the:

10MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE
Technical Challenges:
The first technical challenges which occurs in this case is the service decomposition.
The decomposition of the services needs to be done perfectly and, in many cases, it becomes
challenging due to the complexity. Also, integration between different types of microservices
is another challenge during the splitting of the backend monolithic system that the
Whiteboard organization surely going to face. While Whiteboard will implement the
microservice architecture for student and the learning management system, there will be
another problem which is regarding running of hundreds of different services at the same
time (Levcovitz, Terra & Valente, 2016). In this case, services can have multiple instances
running so that required scale can be achieved. In this aspect, deployment of the processes to
achieve the required scale can be challenging for Whiteboard.
Another important technical challenge is regarding the splitting of the centralised
database. In this scheme for splitting the centralized database first the database will be split
and then the code will be split. In this case, the transactional integrity of the database is
broken where it can have a large impact over the applications (Taibi & Systä, 2019). Through
this splitting application code will remain together. Following, application code will be
broken in two services for completing the process.
Organizational Challenges:
Also, there is a big possibility that the organizational structure of the Whiteboard will
not support the microservice architecture (Dragoni et al., 2017). This is another crucial
challenge that can be only resolved by aligning the organizational structure with the
application architecture.

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Ethical, Legal and Security Issues in the Transiting to Microservice
Architecture:
There can be several of ethical, legal and security related issues in the transition of
microservice architecture. As new system will be implemented Whiteboard might needs to
fire the outdated employees and need to hire new employees which will create a legal issue
(Escobar et al., 2016). As a new system will be implemented it is quite possible that
employees perform wrong with the system, which will lead to ethical issues. Also,
microservice is not a very secured platform which can lead to data theft and can create
security issues for Whiteboard company.
Conclusion:
From the above discussion it can be concluded that microservice architecture is one of
the important criteria which can improve the organizational operations of the Whiteboard
company. To provide a guidance for transition into microservice architecture to the
Whiteboard company, an extensive discussion has been done in this report regarding
microservice architecture. First, three successful implementations of the microservice
architecture has been discussed in this report. Following that principles of service modelling
and technologies has been evaluated in this report. In the next section of this report, the main
challenges regarding splitting the backend monolithic system has been discussed. In the
further section of this report legal, ethical and security issues in transitioning to the
microservice architecture has been discussed.
Recommendation:
Some important recommendation is shared regarding the implementation of
microservice architecture in Whiteboard company.

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 For splitting the core monolithic architecture, Whiteboard should be hiring skilled
exporters.
 The monolithic system should be inspected thoroughly before splitting.
 Small groups can be created by Whiteboard to ensure better implementation of
microservice architecture.
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microservice architecture. In 2016 IEEE 9th International Conference on Service-
Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA) (pp. 44-51). IEEE.
Astrid, M., & Karyono, K. (2016). Communication from Smart Storage Container System
Using Bluetooth, Zigbee, and XML-RPC. Advanced Science Letters, 22(10), 3037-
3042.
Classon, I. (2019). Phase 2: Planning the Architecture. In Migrating ASP. NET Microservices
to ASP. NET Core (pp. 55-62). Apress, Berkeley, CA.
Dragoni, N., Giallorenzo, S., Lafuente, A. L., Mazzara, M., Montesi, F., Mustafin, R., &
Safina, L. (2017). Microservices: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In Present and
ulterior software engineering (pp. 195-216). Springer, Cham.
Escobar, D., Cárdenas, D., Amarillo, R., Castro, E., Garcés, K., Parra, C., & Casallas, R.
(2016, October). Towards the understanding and evolution of monolithic applications
as microservices. In 2016 XLII Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI) (pp. 1-
11). IEEE.

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Goel, D., & Nayak, A. (2019, December). Reactive Microservices in Commodity Resources.
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IEEE.
Hannousse, A., & Yahiouche, S. (2020). Securing Microservices and Microservice
Architectures: A Systematic Mapping Study. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07262.
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Ma, S. P., Chuang, Y., Lan, C. W., Chen, H. M., Huang, C. Y., & Li, C. Y. (2018, October).
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International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE) (pp. 239-244). IEEE.
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management for global enterprise (Doctoral dissertation, dissertation).
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Digital IT Era: Adaptive Integrated Digital Architecture Framework (AIDAF).
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Nadareishvili, I., Mitra, R., McLarty, M., & Amundsen, M. (2016). Microservice
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Schäffer, E., Leibinger, H., Stamm, A., Brossog, M., & Franke, J. (2018). Configuration
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Schneider, B., Pittman, D., Fuentes, B., & Cummings, M. (2019). Distributed,
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