Microservices and the gig economy

We’ve seen a movement towards the adoption of microservices and serverless for product development. The new architectural pattern (microservices) encourages the use of on-demand talent (freelancers) for enterprise development teams.

What is a microservice? The microservice architecture is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are;

Highly maintainable and testable
Loosely coupled
Independently deployable
Organized around business capabilities
A small team owns them.

Read about our API strategy: https://anujxagarwal.medium.com/api-strategy-principles-guide-to-api-economy-b437f37b1b8a

In short, the application will be a collection of simple reusable components independent of each other.

We can use the example of building a car; a car company gets an individual component from 100 different vendors, assembles them with few in-house build components to give each model its unique identity.

Similarly, the microservice architecture allows you to build simple functions independently which can later be combined to give a final shape to the product.

You don’t have to share your application complete code with on-demand talent. The event-driven Microservice model ensures you can decide which piece of info/business logic/ data you expose to freelancer experts.

Below is the product development design architecture we propose.

You can read our journey at https://anujxagarwal.medium.com/monolith-to-microservices-transformation-and-the-challenges-we-faced-f3742853d816

Define each work item (APIs) for individual teams/individuals to work independently.

The in-house IT team will take care of the integrations, build, and security of the application. The internal unit worked on business data-sensitive features.

The design allows users to use the crowd souced ideas to be integrated with the main project, thereby saving the organization’s cost.

Building the architecture with granular level details of each API call and interconnection takes time and effort, but I say it’s worth an effort.

The serverless architecture will also change the way we compare build vs buy, as now we can buy at the function level rather than at the application level. I will talk about the feature-driven product design in my next article.

Feel free to reach out to me in case of any queries.

Is the on-demand talent workforce part of your IT strategic plan?