Digital Innovation Playbook

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

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