Laying the foundation for a successful microservices architecture

We helped a health insurance provider replace an old, monolithic system with an agile microservices architecture.

At a glance

A health insurance provider was experiencing significant delays in releasing new services due to their old monolithic architecture. They knew microservices were key to delivering business value early and often, and they needed an expert to lay the foundation for a successful implementation. That’s why they contacted us.

Customer challenge

Our client’s monolithic architecture was hampering their ability to deliver products and services at a pace that maintained their competitive edge. Even small changes required a lengthy process of testing and re-testing, and high levels of interdependency required coordinating demands from dozens of business units. They needed a solution that would improve IT’s ability to deliver solutions efficiently while also managing costs, and they determined that a microservices architecture was the optimal path.

To successfully deliver their microservices project, our client knew they needed not only a conceptual vision and roadmap, but also the support and commitment of individual business units. Obtaining their buy-in before launch would allow the organization to move forward in delivering microservices that meet the business needs of users across the company.

Why they chose us

One of the project’s stakeholders had worked with us at a previous employer, where we had delivered outstanding results. He knew first-hand the extent of our experience and expertise in architecture, so he knew we were the right choice for this project.

Our results: “The Wins”

We helped our client identify the business and technology drivers that had to be addressed to successfully deliver this project:

• Evangelizing microservices concepts and benefits to individual business groups
• Leveraging microservices to deliver products that differentiate their brand in the marketplace
• Increasing the speed of developing and deploying IT solutions
• Ensuring that the microservices approach aligns with their IT strategy and enterprise architecture
• Mentoring and training developers and analysts in the key elements of a microservices architecture

We met with stakeholders to better understand the organization and to look for areas where microservices offered the greatest potential impact for the lowest cost and risk. We then created a roadmap that began with implementation of microservices in these high-impact areas, then built on those early successes to consistently deliver additional solutions until our client had achieved their goals.

Once this foundation was in place, we worked with our client to deploy the highest-priority and most challenging pieces of the architecture and set them on the road to a successful implementation.

As a result of this project, our client’s IT team is able to deliver solutions efficiently, increasing the number of projects being completed on time and on budget. Products and services can now be launched incrementally, dramatically reducing the need for re-testing. Finally, IT can now create reusable assets, reducing the cost and turnaround time future projects will require.