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).