Why Microservices Architecture is Important for Digital Transformation? Explains Ashwani Kumar – VP, Technology, Coforge

 

We live in an era of digital communication. This could be among the people in the digital space, like social media platforms, or between various software and applications that we constantly use on our phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. The API (Application Programming Interface) is precisely the technology that warrants two applications to interact with one another.

All modern applications and digital services are premised upon the technologies led by API. Companies like Coforge (Formerly known as NIIT Technologies), where Ashwani Kumar is the VP,Enterprise Architecture, stand at the forefront of building Microservices on Open-Source frameworks and products.

How Retail Industry is transforming

India has one of the world’s biggest retail industries with a population of over 1.3 billion. An overwhelming majority of these are retail customers who buy from small-scale enterprises. Such enterprises could sequester massive insights into the sale patterns, demands, and preferences of customers using customer analytics platforms. The platform provides APIs to integrate with the digital e-commerce stores where retailers take advantage of this data to adjust their marketing and operating strategy accordingly through smart insights.

By adopting this concept, the retail industry players reap desirable outcomes like enhanced productivity, efficiency, better management and allocation of funds, high profitability, etc.

How Banking sector is transforming

Like every other sector, the banking sector is also experiencing digitization rapidly. The customers are already adept in the use of technology,expect conveniences and other banking services digitally too. Having realized the relevance of it, banks are working towards Open Banking and developing platforms where the customers could enjoy all the services from a mobile device irrespective of where they are located.

Open banking is a new age banking practice term where the banks open access to their data like the consumer data, the transactions, and other financial data to Third Party Partners (TPP) through public APIs. This move has resulted in the unaffiliated third parties creating specialized services that have created new banking business models and a better banking experience for the consumers.

Many of the banks are hundreds of years old and are big users of legacy technology. Successful adoption of Open banking standards will involve extensive reengineering steps, both in application architecture and infrastructure. Moving to anAPI-based architecture will be greatly aided by the implementation of microservices architecture which is a critical enabler that allows efficient and accelerated integration with third parties.

Industry 4.0 and Automation

The prime example of the interaction of machines and robots with one another could be observed in the manufacturing sector. While the majority of manufacturing is semi and fully automatedusing automated robots, there is still a need for human oversight.With advancements in technologies like AI and Machine Learning the next phase will be entirely autonomous with minimal involvement of humans in the loop. The natural consequences of it will be enhanced productivity, negligible errors, shifting the dangerous jobs to robots, etc. For all of this to work, the machines are needed to work in harmony which could only be achieved through synchronization among the machines using APIs to modernize their legacy systems.

About the Microservices Framework

Coforge has created the Microservices and the DevOps framework built entirely upon Open-source technologies. The framework consists of standards, guidelines, license information, and step by step golden path to building a highly scalable, secured microservices solution. The framework uses more than 20 popular open-source frameworks and products running seamlessly in an integrated manner.

Some of the features of the framework developed by Coforge are Zero down-time deployable, efficient interservice communications, High Availability and Scalability, Observability, Testability, End to end DevOps automation, configuration management, and cloud-ready.

Supervising the technology at Coforge, Ashwani Kumar understands the value of bringing advanced technologies into even smaller businesses. The digital age that we live in inherently requires virtual platforms where the potential customers could structure their demands according to their preferences and at the same time, the businesses could save all this information and devise their products and services to serve those demands. After all, what is business, if not the exchange of each other’s demands?