Client background:

GlobalTranz is a logistics services provider and 3PL offering freight management technology and services..

Business Challenge

  • GTZ needed to upgrade their application as a service. The monolithic applications also need to move to cloud-native microservices. These applications facilitated overlapping functions of Quotes, Orders, Accounting, and management of user base including Customers, Agents and Vendors

  • Need for lesser inter-team dependencies, reduced and more focused QA needs, and faster turnaround while making changes to individual business areas.

  • UI and Operation needs that spanned multiple business areas

Business >Solution

  • Overlapping functions of Accounting/Orders/customers, agents/vendors were analyzed and separated into Lanes with clear boundaries

  • Lanes based on independent functional areas. Lane capability analysis led to high level (coarse grained) APIs per lane, Bundled as a Hub (per Lane).

  • The lane functionality was implemented as multiple lane-specific, cloud-based, self-contained, microservices designed on single responsibility principle. Hub served as a gateway for accessing this functionality by routing to or orchestrating the underlying microservices.

  • All inter-lane communication and communication of lanes with external systems/UIs were mandated through hubs. This strategy resulted in more control on lane access authorization, improved logging, and more visible and manageable inter-service communication pathways.

  • Hubs were kept very thin having responsibility of only routing the requests to appropriate microservices and would occasionally have orchestration logic.

  • 200+ microservices were deployed on cloud with individual/shared data stores.

  • Facade services were created for UIs that consumed data from multiple lanes

Business Benefits

  • A 90+ people team was deployed. We continue to maintain the improve the application which is now the backbone of the company.

  • Increased customer ease with APIs available for integration

  • Quick turnaround time supporting multiple business changes

  • Operation costs optimisation

  • Consolidated views of data were created (ElasticSearch indexes and SQL Data-marts for facilitating listing and searching of data spanning multiple data stores and microservices).