Digital Innovation Playbook

Modernizing product architectures for the digital future

About our playbook

Today, digital innovation is at the heart of every organization. Your product needs to be fast, cheap, and better than the competition. Plus, you need to find new ways to engage users, who, in the pandemic context, have become accustomed to fast and reliable services around the clock. The market does not stop, it continues to thrive, and the fact that it changes at a rapid pace means that you’re essentially planning around a moving target. You need a faster path to transform your innovative new ideas into winning applications.

This is where we jump in.

The Maxcode Digital Innovation Playbook is an all-digital guide that will touch upon different topics every issue, allowing you to analyze your product’s technical strategy, evaluate your company’s focus, and approach your business development at full speed.

 

Architecture innovation

From our over 15 years experience of working with clients in the fintech market, we noticed certain trends and movements when it comes to modernizing architectures.

Let’s take a hypothetical bank payment app with a classic monolithic architecture, and some thousand customers onboarded on the platform. The simplicity of a monolith allowed for easy development, painless end-to-end testing, effortless development and horizontal scaling.

However, what happens when this bank app starts getting millions of requests in a matter of days and floods the system? Transactional requests start to either slow down or fail, resulting in poor customer experiences and backlash over social media.

Then stakeholders and product managers come with new feature ideas to be added to their bank app, which complicates development even further.

Issues of scalability, new feature requirements, demand for fast paced development as well as short deployment and release cycles force the bank’s design architects to move their application from current monolithic architecture to a better approach, suited to their development, scalability, agility and time to market needs.

But let’s talk about suitability

Any new architecture, aside from solving issues like maintainability or flexibility, also has its trade-offs. Apart from difficulties in integration testing and having a newly increased complexity in your overall architecture and costs, let’s also talk about the skills and the time needed to perform such a change. The goal is always to innovate and lean towards the modern approach, yet you also need to consider what needs to be done urgently, what can be fixed, and what is the step-by-step approach to the final picture. That means that you need to be flexible in your architecture as well, with changes that can benefit both the product, the team, and the time to market.

 

Innovation, one-step at a time

Modern architectures as they are presented today are often being used as a wedge to convince people to abandon their current solutions and brand them as legacy. However, is having a legacy architecture such a bad thing? Do you need to shift your attention completely and cast aside everything you currently have, even if it still works?

Legacy has been used to describe a technology that is no longer relevant and out of touch with the marketplace, a codebase that is hard to change or enhance with new features, yet at the same time which contains critical business rules. Thus, legacy is a word that also describes proven capabilities passed from one generation to the next. So yes, you should look at innovation beyond legacy, yet you should also look at what your legacy architecture has to offer so that you can learn from it, and build from it.

Therefore, even if the first impulse is to renounce your current infrastructure and tools, in order to adopt a completely new architecture, another idea may be to have a different mindset altogether: modernize your environment. This means always having the intention to move towards new and better settings, while considering what is best for your product and your users for the time being, keeping the good and improving the old.

Yet is this possible?

We are here to tell you that it is. And more than that, we are here to show you how to do it, where and when it needs to be done.

 

Navigate through our playbook

Serverless – a Friend to Monoliths and Microservices

Given the benefits to project maintainability and scalability, let’s explore the ways in which serverless is a friend to monoliths and microservices alike, helping either without discrimination.

Go to article

 

Monolith to Micro/Macro Services in the World of Spring

Learn how you can use Spring Cloud Gateway to transition from a monolithic web project to a micro/macro service architecture.

Go to article

 

 

Evaluate your product

This edition of our building growth playbook is the result of the combined work and effort of talented software developers and business professionals, who can sit down with you to evaluate your company’s technical status and see what is the best approach going further, be it serverless or otherwise.

Contact us

 

Ruxandra Bucos, Software Developer, Maxcode

Ruxandra Bucos

Senior Software Developer

 

Ghenadie Cebanu

Senior Software Developer

 

Andreea Zanfirescu

Business Development Manager