42Flows From Legacy Fintech to Future Innovation Fast

42Flows From Legacy Fintech to Future Innovation Fast

Our traditional fintech clients have large monoliths of applications, often silos of financial, customer or marketing data. They face an uphill battle to compete:

  • To introduce a new feature takes months and often years to bring to production
  • Everyone fears touching the large legacy monolith, due to fears of introducing unintended bugs in common libraries and common code
  • Test cycles are long and require full regression of the platform
  • Deployment cycles are long and the test and deployment means that we have to try and bundle a large number of features into increasingly complicated releases
  • Performance is poor, it is not cloud ready and is built on old and expensive license technology that doesn't easily scale

They all desire to move to a smarter and more agile environment but the challenge seems too high until they talk to 42flows.tech and we share our tools and experience. After all our motto is “Future, Fintech, Fast”?

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Monoliths Start becoming spaghetti fast

Break Your Monolith into Microservices

Microservices is a common architecture approach where the application is divided into small, autonomous services that work together. It is based on on a lean, agile business principle where we:

  • Keep each vertical business unit separate and allow them to innovate as fast as the business can allow
  • Introduce new services and verticals without disrupting the existing enterprise?
  • Prevent service or cyber issues from impacting other parts of the business
  • Allow successful services to scale by cloning services?
  • Remove legacy services without impacting the rest of the enterprise services?
  • Move services across hosting and cloud platform without impacting the rest of the enterprise services?

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Standalone services allow for scalability and agility

Is Microservices something new? While the term might still sound fresh, the approach itself evolved from best practices combining techniques that were around for quite some time: small autonomous teams, systems at scale, domain-driven design, continuous delivery, on-demand virtualization, infrastructure automation, and others.

Small and Autonomous

Business groups and software code become unmanageable as they grow too large. Like trying to walk a dozen dogs, with each new release it becomes harder and harder to track, coordinate where the changes are and the overhead just becomes too big and full of relations.

To prevent this from happening we adopt the single responsibility principle. While in monolithic systems we try to achieve this by code classes, abstractions and modules. Microservices provide a clearer separation of responsibility into independent services focused on a specific task and connected through APIs. Microservice is an autonomous entity that can be deployed on a platform as a service (PAAS) and can be changed and deployed independently of other microservices.

It’s hard to tell how small the services should be in terms of code lines but as Jon Eaves stated in his article it is something that can be rewritten by the team in two weeks.

Benefits

Technology Choice Versatility, Freedom to Innovate

With microservices we can choose a suitable technology for each service separately, ensuring that it is the perfect fit for a specific case. As the IT industry changes rapidly and new technologies emerge every day it comes really handy as we are not bound to a strict technology stack for the whole of our enterprise. If some part of it requires an update in terms of performance or data storage capabilities or any other kind of enhancement, we may switch the technology stack of that service to the one that fits our needs best without a need to rewrite the whole project.

Resilience

In Monolithic based architecture if one part of the system fails it usually means that the whole system stops working. Microservice based systems are designed in a way that if one component fails, the failure doesn’t cascade. You can isolate a problem and fix it separately.

Scaling

If one or two small parts of our service require more resources , we don’t need to scale everything all together. We choose the services that need a boost and invest in them directly, which is cost efficient. We invest in winners.?

Deployment

Each minor change to the monolithic application requires a large deployment. Large regression test and large risk risk. Due to the risk involved such deploys happen infrequently, which results in an even higher risk.

With microservices, services are being deployed independently. If the problem occurs, it can be located, isolated and fixed faster. Has less side effects and ensures a faster time to market for the new functionality.

Big Teams - Big Coordination Overhead

Big teams and big codebases are always a problem. We work best in small focused units with clear contracts with other teams.

Versatility and Reusability

In a fast-paced world end-users might be interested in your service today and want to lean towards something else the day after. The fintech world we love is filled buzzing with new features:

  • By now pay later?
  • Virtual cards?
  • Stocks, investments, crypto
  • Personal financial management?
  • Embedded finance?
  • Microloans

Microservices architecture allows you to reuse the separated services in your other projects.

42Flows Smart Teams with Smart Tool to SpeedUp Integrations

From our experience, integration tasks are the most critical, and that is the place where most problems appears. To move from legacy to rapid innovation fast and effectively we use Node-Red. An open source, low code, nodejs integration tool that allows us to:

  • Wrap legacy platforms and create a contract with the rest of the business
  • Introduce new services behind the integration fast without breaking any contracts?
  • Divide and conquer the legacy platform until we are lean and mean?

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Node-Red can be a great helper here. It’s a perfect match for integrations with out of the box:

  • All basic communication protocols: SMS, SMTP, Web Notifications, and Chatbots.
  • Database: Postgres, Oracle, MongoDb, IBM, MsSql?
  • Messaging: Rabbit Mq, Kafka etc
  • Cloud AWS: Lamba, EC2, Kinesis, S3, SNS, DynamoDB, SQS (alpha release), IoT, IotData, RDS, Firehose, KMS, Redshift, Route53, AWS config
  • Azure and Google GCP: Full range of connectors include Azure translator, Big Data and Machine learning?

And many more ..?

Practice shows that businesses want to change the business logic frequently to try out new approaches and tune the current ones in search for perfection. Node-Red allows us to make these changes fast, increasing time to market. Within Nod-Red you can focus on implementing business rules instead of writing large amounts of code.

Sounds Good Tell me More

If you have a?

  • new fintech project?
  • neobank
  • bank transformation,?
  • crypto exchange integration
  • in-app chat
  • anything you think is a challenge that needs to be deliver fast?

Then we think we have great experience that would make for a productive conversation.

Contact as on

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