Microservice Architecture for Information Security Solutions
Data protection has always been a priority for companies in all industries. SimbirSoft has been assisting a customer in the development of a major InfoSec solution for more than four years. This case study describes the latest project — migrating it from monolithic to microservices architecture.
Customer
Our customer is a Russian developer of information security solutions. The company is developing a service for centralized management of user accounts in corporate information systems. The solution makes it possible to administer the credentials of the organization's employees, as well as automate business processes associated with the provision of access to information resources.
Our Objectives
We began working with the customer in 2018 and have been involved in five projects since then. One of them was designed to solve key technical and business tasks of the customer:
- Support and expand the functionality of the system to attract new customers and maintain competitiveness.
- Performance optimization.
- Migration to a new architecture.
Migration to the Microservices Architecture
The customer was looking for suitable solutions to upgrade the system. We discussed possible options with the customer and decided to move away from the monolithic architecture to the microservices architecture. We solved several problems at once:
- Dependence on a limited proprietary technology stack.
- Lack of a well-developed community of specialists who know the right stack. This limited the prospects for product development and made it difficult to find suitable developers.
- Lack of technology documentation.
- Growing complexity of supporting a large monolith solution over the years.
The transition from monolith to microservices, in addition to solving the abovementioned problems, opened up prospects for development in the SaaS format and improving the commercial potential of the product.
The migration to the new architecture gave the customer the following benefits:
- Modern technology stack.
- Advanced community of specialists, potential employees.
- A lot of technology documentation.
- Ability to make isolated changes to a separate microservice.
- Rapid integration of new developers into the project.
- Ability to scale only the necessary high-load services, not the entire application.
Result
We achieved optimized performance and fault tolerance, and ensured continuous development of system components.
We finalized the user interface and convenient controls of many system elements for which we previously implemented only the server part. In addition to making the customer's work easier, new commercial prospects for the product promotion opened up.
Support team: team leader (SDET), backend developer, QA, 2 SDET specialists
Microservices team: team leader (backend), 3 backend developers
Technologies
Java 11, Groovy, Activiti BPMN, Spring 5, Spring Boot 2, Spring Cloud, jOOQ, Apache Felix, Open Search, PostgreSQL, Spock Framework, Liquibase, Maven, OpenAPI, Kubernetes, Istio