The client: Prvá stavebná sporiteľňa
Prvá stavebná sporiteľňa was established in 1992 as the first specialized building society of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe. It focuses on building savings and, since its establishment, has served 2.5 million clients, concluded 5 million contracts, and provided 700,000 housing loans worth €11.4 billion. It has long held a dominant share of the building savings market.
PSS recognizes that maintaining its dominant position in the future depends not only on high-quality services but also on efficient IT infrastructure. This was one of the reasons we established a successful collaboration across several digitalization and IT modernization projects. One of these projects was the development of a microservices architecture.
The problem
In response to IT modernization and digital transformation trends, PSS decided to move to a new infrastructure platform, a container platform that we also delivered, based on Docker technology. The existing software services, however, were built on older technologies, tightly coupled, and integrated through a shared database.
As a result, they could not take full advantage of the new platform, particularly its scalability and support for independent deployment. Extensive future extensions of the core banking system were also planned, but integrating them into the existing architecture would have been difficult.
The solution
The appropriate solution was to move to a microservices architecture. Unlike a “traditional” monolithic architecture, this approach uses an application composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller components or services. Its benefits include faster and more cost-effective updates and simpler, less expensive scaling of individual parts of an application without affecting the rest.
To provide optimal functionality for the selected solution, we decided to implement a new generation of REST services built on the Spring Boot framework. Containerization also allows services to use their own NoSQL database instances, reducing dependencies between them. In addition to a REST interface, the services use asynchronous communication through Apache Kafka. We used ELK stack for log management. Logging is asynchronous, and the logs can be used for analytics and visualizations.
Results and benefits
The result is a scalable and maintainable platform built on modern technologies. The architecture we designed has also proven effective in practice, and with only a few exceptions, all services have been fully migrated. New services, including those delivered by external providers, are now developed exclusively for the new platform.
Asynchronous communication reduces dependencies between individual services, accelerates development, and, most importantly, simplifies integration of new components. The solution also provides zero-downtime deployment of new components, significantly simplifying the overall deployment process. Services run in multiple instances, which increases resilience to outages while allowing solution capacity to be adjusted to increased demand, for example during migrations.
- Accelerated development of new services and integration of new components;
- increased resilience to outages;
- reduced dependencies between individual services;
- scalability.
