Moving to Microservices From a Monolithic Environment

By: Dominick Profico, Executive Vice President & CTO, Mobiquity

Monolithic platforms and services are simply a part of the fabric of the insurance world. They are established, understood, and trusted. Moving away from the monolith is a scary proposition, but moving to a microservice architecture is necessary when contemplating the creation of new digital products. When it comes to implementing microservices for your insurance company, there are several considerations and best practices that should be predefined before you begin the process. In this blog, we’ll explore these considerations based on what we’ve learned when working with some of the biggest insurance companies around the world.

Establish a digital enablement group and get stakeholder support at the executive level.

In order for you to transition from a monolithic and stovepiped environment, you must have support from the leaders in your organization who can help champion the migration to microservices. Without this support, it’s easy for teams to go back to their silo and not fully benefit from a true microservice architecture. Save yourself the time by getting leadership on board.

Avoid thinking about the tech first. Think about your domain.

Microservices offer a great deal of IT benefits; however, to get the most value from this structure, consider your domain. How your business functions should help drive the way that you organize so that the technology works seamlessly on the backend, creating a functional digital product that customers rave about.

Put on your strategic, enterprise architecture thinking cap.

Oftentimes, multilayered companies with many departments and teams can be a barrier to creating a successful microservice environment. We see this especially with insurance companies that, rightfully so, have departments that are focused solely on their specific needs. The companies that are successful use best practice #1 (leadership buy in and support) to bring everyone together so that the digital products they create are meaningful for their customers. This is the time to look at your enterprise and consider how best to align people, processes, and tools to drive the digital experience of your customers. Enterprise changes are always a challenge, and so change management is critical to ensuring that your migration goes smoothly. Do not overlook this step.

Work backwards from your user experience.

Breaking the monolith and implementing microservices is more than encapsulating your existing APIs and server applications. Regardless of the kind of architecture you seek to create or the digital product you plan to launch, the customer experience should always be central in everything you do. While a microservices based architecture, when done well, can provide the flexibility and scale needed to meet your users’ ever evolving needs, those needs, and the experience that satisfies them, have to remain the North Star that anchors all of your technical choices.

At the end of the day, great microservices allow you to create great products. And while microservices aren’t a panacea for everything, they are a means to an end for creating amazing experiences for your digital products.

Interested in learning more about how Mobiquity can help you migrate from a monolithic environment?

Originally published at https://www.mobiquity.com.