Microservices Architecture Transition Report for MIS603 Assessment 2

This report examines microservices architecture, focusing on its implementation and benefits for Whiteboard Company. It begins with an executive summary outlining the company's need for a new technology strategy to support its learning management systems. The report then explores successful implementations of microservices by Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Zalando, providing insights into their strategies and outcomes. Service modeling principles, including SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST, are discussed in detail, highlighting their characteristics and advantages. The report also contrasts microservices with monolithic architecture, outlining the drawbacks of the latter. Finally, it addresses issues in microservices architecture and concludes with recommendations for transitioning to this approach. The report aims to provide a clear understanding of microservices architecture and its role in modern software development, offering valuable insights for students and professionals alike.

Running head: MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTURE
MIS603
MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURE
Assessment 2
29/03/2019
2500 words
Name of the Student
Student ID
Torrens email address
Name of campus learning facilitator
Name of Subject coordinator

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Executive Summary
Chief Technology Officer of Whiteboard decided to rebuild their technology strategy as well
as the management of the IT delivery teams because they want to provide reliable student as
well as learning management systems to the six hundred universities and institutions across
the globe. In this particular case, Microservices architecture plays a vital role for the learning
systems of Whiteboard Company. Microservices architecture provides short deployment
cycles and it has some immediate effects. It becomes a de facto standard for development and
deployment of software. Most part of Microservices architecture is that it provides data
sovereignty. Its autonomy and isolation features are the key success factors for the software
developers. It also gives agility in the software development. It gives lots of advantages to the
Whiteboard compared to the monolithic architecture. It gives scalability of the software
systems and gives faster development of the software. This report gives a clear idea regarding
the transition to the Microservices architecture.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Successful implementation of Microservices architecture.........................................................3
Service modelling principles......................................................................................................5
Drawbacks of monolithic architecture.....................................................................................13
Issues in the Microservices architecture..................................................................................14
Conclusion................................................................................................................................15
Recommendation......................................................................................................................16
References................................................................................................................................17

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Introduction
Microservices architecture is a software development methodology. It performs
encapsulation for a function or a business capability (Amin et al., 2020). It can be deployed
independently or a business capability. At current scenario, this technology becomes very
popular because most of the enterprises want to provide agility in their software development.
It becomes very much beneficial for their DevOps teams.
In this report, at first, successful implementations of the Microservices architecture
are discussed (Chandramouli & Butcher, 2020). After that, it will discuss regarding the
service modelling principles. After that, disadvantages of monolithic architecture and issues
of Microservices architecture.
Successful implementation of Microservices architecture
Many companies are using Microservices architecture for developing their software
(Hautte et al., 2020). Here, three popular implementations of Microservices architecture are
discussed in detail.
Amazon
Amazon was the first company who implemented Microservices which changed the
whole business. This company reached highest level of success when monolithic architecture
was the only way to develop software (Khan, 2020). All its component and services were
tightly coupled with each other. They had hundreds of developers within the organisations,
Amazon was not able deploy their design in the swift design mode.
All codes were lost in the deployment pipeline for weeks before the use of consumer.
Amazon implemented Microservices to reduce the pipeline (Liu, Huang & Lu, 2020). It also

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makes the pipeline very simple. Developers broke down the structures into multiple parts. It
helped them to realize actual location of the bottlenecks. It allowed the developers to redesign
the software as a service-oriented-architecture (Mazzara et al., 2020). Each small team was
dedicated to deliver a particular service.
It concluded with world’s one of the largest online software (Megargel,
Shankararaman & Walker, 2020). After that, Amazon released open source solutions (such as
AWS) for other companies.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola Company faced severe challenges to connect various components of
different countries. At that time, global IT group of the Coca-Cola Company has decided to
implement Microservices architecture and Application Programmable Interface to reach their
target. They gradually replace their legacy software (Mohammed, Fiaidhi & Tang, 2020). In
this case, rapid modifications are impossible because of the implementation of more than
solutions globally.
It is well-known to the company that they can implement Microservices architecture.
After that, they move to a new type of architecture called DevOps tools. Inside this, they have
introduced a structure segregated into single application (Pahl, Jamshidi & Zimmermann,
2020). With the help of this, they can address which may highlight the speed as well as
agility. On the other hand, GIT developed a library for their reusable modules (named
Anypoint Platform), organised into various domains which are available in all entities inside
the group.

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Along with the technology as well as architecture, Coca-Cola focused on the
procedures as well as people (Putra et al., 2020). The company transferred themselves from
COE model to C4E model (Centre 4 Excellence).
Zalando
The Microservices architecture of Zalando implements Amazon Web Services for
provisioning, Docker for the purpose of deployment and App Dynamics as well as Zmon 2.0
for monitoring purposes (Rozi et al., 2020). But within this, a small fraction of technologies
are used. They scaled and improved their new solutions. Zalando created a new solution
named STRUMS. It is an open source solution.
In the year 2010, magneto based e-commerce system of Zalando did not bale to carry
huge amount of load. They had an urgent need of a new IT infrastructure. In 2015, they
migrated from monolithic to Microservices architecture (Rumiński & Walczak, 2020). The
new Microservices architecture was designed and constructed a close relation with their
organisational structure, business logic as well as culture. Both technical and business teams
were searching for a new mindset.
After migrating to Microservices, Zalando developed a flexible, global system as well
as an entire new work culture (Schreiber, 2020). With independent team, the company
enhanced their productions and increased the number of innovations. Zalando ensured that
they used 4 eye principle and other security requirements.
Service modelling principles
 SOAP
SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. It is platform
independent messaging protocol. It is totally based on Extensible Markup

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Language (Schwarz & Riehle, 2020). It gives the data transport facility in
web services. It helps to connect client applications with the remote servers
very easily. It helps to invoke the remote methods within an application.
Main intention of SOAP is to perform the remote procedure call. It has four
elements.
 Envelop
It helps to perform the initiation and termination of SOAP
message.
 Header
It has some optional attributes and it is used for message
processing purpose (Song, Nguyen & Chauvel, 2020). It is not a
mandatory element.
 Body
It is totally based on XML (Sun, 2020). It contains some data
which is being delivered. It is a compulsory element for SOAP.
 Fault
It is not a compulsory element in SOAP (Vilalta et al., 2020). It
gives lots of information regarding the errors while processing the
messages.
All these messages are declared inside the default namespace of SOAP envelop.
There are several advantages of SOAP. These are as follows:

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 When a web services is designed then some programming languages are necessary for
interacting with the client side applications (Wang et al., 2020). SOAP is most
efficient for achieving this purpose. This protocol is recommended by W3C
consortium which is governing body of all kinds of web standards.
 SOAP is treated as a light weight protocol (Zhang, 2020). It is used for data
interchange among different types of applications.
 SOAP is a platform independent. It is designed in such a fashion that it is not all
dependent on operating system (Amin et al., 2020). So, SOAP protocol works on any
programming languages based applications for both Windows and Linux operating
system.
 It works on HTTP protocol (Hautte et al., 2020). It is default protocol used by all web
based applications. For that reason, there is no form of customization which is needed
to execute on web services designed on the SOAP based protocol for working on the
World Wide Web.
There are some disadvantages of SOAP web services. These are as follows:
 SOAP uses the XML based protocol which is parsed for reading. It
elaborates many standards that must be followed while developing
SOAP based applications (Khan, 2020). That is why; it is very slow
and consumes a huge amount of bandwidth.
 SOAP uses WSDL and does not have any other procedure to discover
the services (Mazzara et al., 2020).

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Figure 1: Building block of SOAP message
Source: https://www.guru99.com/soap-simple-object-access
protocol.html
 XML RPC
XML RPC is the simplest version of the XML protocol for transferring of
information among the computers. It helps a computer programme to apply computer
functions very efficiently (Putra et al., 2020). It helps a programme to apply procedure
calls a network. It implements HTTP protocol for transferring information from one

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computer to another. It has a small XML vocabulary for describing various type
requests as well as responses. It contains three parts. These are as follows:
 XML-RPC data model
 XML-RPC request structures
 XML-RPC response structures
There are some basic data types that are available for XML RPC (Rozi et al.,
2020). These are as follows:
 int or i4
 double
 Boolean
 base64
 dateTime.iso8601
Basic elements are enclosed with value elements. Basic type elements may be
added with more than two complicated data types such as arrays and structs. Strings
are enclosed with value elements (Rumiński & Walczak, 2020). Arrays represent
some sequential information and structs represents some name value pair such as
hashtables, associative arrays and many others. Arrays are declared with the help of
some array elements and contain some data elements.

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Figure 2: XML-RPC protocol
Source: https://bestwebsoft.com/what-is-xml-rpc/
 REST
REST stands for Representational State Transfers. It uses HTTP protocol. It is
nothing but a web standard. In this architecture, REST server provides access to all
the resources and REST client can access and modify all the resources. Each of the
resources is identified by the Uniform Resource Locator (Schreiber, 2020). It is used
to design the loosely coupled software applications. It has six architectural
interfaces. These are as follows:
 Uniform Interfaces
A resource inside a system must have only a single Uniform Resource
Identifier. It is always a good approach to synonymize a resource with the
web page (Sun, 2020). Any single resource is not very large and it contains
every thing within its representation. All resources can be approached with

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the help of some common approach such as HTTP, GET and many others.
Representation of the resources across the system should follow specific
guidelines.
 Client server
It means that client and server applications must be evolved in separate
manner and it has no dependency among each other. Client should know the
URIs of the resources.
 Stateless
In this REST architecture, all the interactions are stateless (Sun, 2020).
Server is not responsible to preserve any information regarding the latest
HTTP request. It will treat every request as a new request.
Following are the four HTTP methods used for REST architecture.
 GET
It gives read only access to a resource.
 POST
It is used to create new resources.
 DELETE
It is used to remove the resource.
 PUT
It is used to update the exisisting resource or create a new
resource.

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Web services based on the REST architecture are known as the Restful Web
Services (Vilalta et al., 2020). These are using HTTP methods for implementing the
REST architecture. It defines a Uniform Resource Identifier and gives some resource
representation such as JSON and HTTP methods.
There are lots of advantages of REST web services (Wang et al., 2020). These
are as follows:
 Learning curve is very easy since it is working on HTTP protocol.
 It supports more than one technology for data transfer such as text,
xml, json, image and many others.
 There is not such contract between client and server (Zhang, 2020).
That is why, it is called loosely coupled implementation.
 REST is a lightweight protocol
 It can be tested very easily on the browser.

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Figure 2: PHP REST Web Services
Source: https://phppot.com/php/php-restful-web-service/
Drawbacks of monolithic architecture
 Applications are very much complicated as well as large (Schreiber, 2020).
That is why, it is hardly possible to understand the system and make
modifications in a proper manner.
 The size of the software is very limited.
 For getting every update, developers need to redesign the entire software.
 It is hardly possible to perform continuous deployment.
 If different modules have different needs resources then it is scaling of the
monolithic applications is very difficult.

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 Reliability is a crucial issue in monolithic architecture (Rozi et al., 2020).
Errors of the monolithic applications can potentially damage the entire
software
 Monolithic applications are not able to adopt the latest technologies
(Mazzara et al., 2020). If there are some modifications then it may hamper
the entire application. Then it becomes very costly and time-consuming
procedures.
Issues in the Microservices architecture
 As the number of Microservices increases, then it will be very difficult to
manage them. If it is not managed properly, then it will go out of hand. Many
leaders of engineering stated that, improper management of this service may
have a huge problem as same as the problem occurred while migrating from
monolithic to Microservices architecture (Khan, 2020). Development of
Microservices based architecture can be very complicated and cumbersome.
 It is very important that individual services do not bring down the whole
system. Fault tolerance at the entire service level is very important. Failure in
the Microservices architecture is quite common (Hautte et al., 2020). They
should have the ability to cope up with internal and external failures. Robust
resilient testing is the only way to resolve this issue.
 Dependency management among various services are very important for
software development (Amin et al., 2020). Cyclic redundancy can resolved
properly if it is not resolved appropriately. In Microservices architecture,
dependency issues cam lead to a huge amount of vulnerability. With these
dependencies, taking decisions can be very critical.

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 Maintenance and Configuration of Microservices can be a big issue in
Microservices architecture. There are challenges of maintenance and
configuration of API based architecture (Putra et al., 2020). According to
Jonah Kowall, if monitoring of an application is not end-to-end then it will
become too much costly to isolate these issues. Without any automation
strategy, it is not possible to monitor the changes and threats.
 It is very well known that caching can decreases the sheer frequency of the
request mode. In the DevOps framework, caching has the ability to enhance
the number of services (Schreiber, 2020). It increases the complexity of the
application and establishes the communication among the inter-service groups.
In this case, automation, optimisation and ordering are the latest needs inside
the monolithic development platforms.
Conclusion
When Whiteboard Company wants to develop a new learning system then they should
consider agile as a software development methodology. It helps the company to provide the
rapid delivery of services. Microservices architecture is the best way to develop this type of
system. It helps to develop software in a faster rate by designing them as a collection of
small, modular and independent services. It is true that designing software using the
Microservices architecture concept is very challenging and requires Paradigm shift compared
to monolithic architecture. It is not a Silver bullet which can solve the complexity issues for
all kinds of applications. On the other hand, it is not all a hype driven development or a Cargo
Cult. But it is also true that, Microservices architecture is very efficient in software
development. Large enterprises develop complex software for their company. Microservices
architecture is the only way to tackle the complexity of that software. It makes the company

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competitive in the market. For medium and small enterprises, Microservices architecture
should be used for sustainable software development which may provide a long term benefit
to a company. It is true that early adopters of the Microservices architecture gained
significant competitive advantages over their rivals. In this report, three successful
implementation of the Microservices architecture are discussed elaborately. Name of the
companies are Amazon, Coca-Cola and Zalando. In this report, some principles of service
modelling (such as REST, SOAP and XML-RPC) are discussed in detail. These are very
important for developing Microservices architecture based application.
Recommendation
Whiteboard Company must use REST web services for transitioning to Microservices
based architecture for their learning system. But company should be aware of the complexity,
pros and cons of those applications. They must avoid disastrous mistakes and should adopt
better technological decisions regarding Microservices. The biggest mistake that can be made
by the company is to migrate to the Microservices architecture without having a clear target.
Whiteboard Company needs to understand the real situation and reason why they want this. If
the company really wants to implement this then they should go for RESTful web services
for the development of the application because it has lots of advantages over SOAP web
services. REST is coupled with JSON. That is why; it provides a good support to the browser
clients.

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