Banking APIs and Microservices at Enterprise Scale
The financial industry has formally started to convert efforts towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) plans. Although these plans are more agile and operational models of APIs and microservices, most banks have not reached the scale and demand of a full enterprise suite of APIs across their organization. As many financial institutions begin to find feasible ways to convert their efforts, how can your organization build banking APIs and microservices at enterprise scale?
Well, there are several things to consider when designing a scalable APV microservice architecture to accommodate the demand of full scale internal and public facing API operations for your bank. Many financial institutions have opted for an API gateway delivery model to manage their public and private API interfaces, but this will not scale efficiently or effectively to the enterprise-wide banking needs of your organization.
Most API gateway products on the market today are rebranded Enterprise Service Bus platforms which accounts for the main cause of the API gateway problem. Many API gateway products, even those that were engineered from the ground up as a proper API gateway, may suffer from scalability issues when there are thousands of APIs calling on tens of thousands of microservices in play.
Standalone gateways are a problem for financial institutions, such as the fact that they duplicate several functions already available in existing firewalls and proxy services on the network. This results in API-specific functions losing efficiency due to being managed through a centralized platform. Many organizations understand that they can scale standalone gateways through clustering devices but what many don’t realize is that there are diminishing returns as the need for cluster coordination traffic within the cluster of gateways erodes the effective number of APIs and volumes of requests that can be processed by the platform.
Due to this, many organizations have started splitting APIs and microservices amongst several clusters of API gateways to manage through-put and availability. The problem with this solution, though, is that it creates increasing logistical and infrastructure management chaos for not only developers but IT operations as well.
The best solution is to build the functions required by APIs and microservices directly into the container solution that is delivering those APIs and microservices making it easier for your organization to manage the entire swarm of containers that delivers APIs and microservices as entities within groups within a cloud. This will make it more feasible for your enterprise to scale and operationalize the management of your APIs and microservices within your existing tools and platforms without the need to create another island of management interfaces.
With the proper solution, your organization will be able to handle APIs and microservices easily and these processes will be able to scale as your enterprise takes on more workload. As your financial institution converts its efforts towards a Service Oriented Architecture, you may be wary of the issues that may arise and unsure of how to avoid these problems. With a proper solution though, you’ll not only be able to build banking APIs as your enterprise scales, but you’ll also be able to do the same with microservices. Don’t make the mistake of choosing the wrong solution for your SOA conversion.
Check out this comprehensive whitepaper about how Building Banking APIs and Microservice at Enterprise Scale can be easy for your organization and don’t fail at your SOA efforts before you even begin.
