Microservices

To transparently upgrade their prepaid platform, a telecom operator decided to introduce an API gateway between both legacy and new clients.

Challenge

In the context of this engagement, key success criteria are ensuring protocol compatibility with legacy applications, protecting sensitive data through validation, and controlling access to APIs. Additionally, managing API versions and monitoring usage and performance add complexity to the process.

Solution

To address that challenge, Neurocom software engineering team developed a set of microservices on Redhat Openshift monitored by the ELK stack.

The solution offers a diverse range of communication protocols. Currently, it supports TCP and SOAP for serving requests from legacy clients. It manages a total of nine service calls from legacy clients and more than twenty service calls from new ones, with each call routed to the corresponding microservice. Each microservice then translates requests from REST + JSON to XML RPC, REST + XML, or REST + JSON based on the protocol used by the backend server.

Furthermore, API GW leverages three utility microservices: config-server for configuration, eureka-server for service discovery, and gateway for identification assignment at the entry point.

Results

The implementation of API GW successfully overcomes the challenge of managing and securing APIs within a microservices architecture. It enables compatibility with legacy applications, protects sensitive data, controls API access, manages versions, handles documentation, and monitors usage and performance.

Through its modular approach and support for various protocols, API GW simplifies the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, allowing for efficient and seamless communication between clients and backend services.