Infosys TechCompass

Architecture and design

Trend 1: Adoption of CNCF standards increases

The microservices architecture helped achieve on-demand elasticity and scalability of APIs for both on-premises and public hyperscaler infrastructure. APIs and microservices had to deploy hybrid infrastructure in addition to serverless infrastructure to support evolving requirements. This highlighted the necessity to standardize orchestration, container management, cluster management, and circuit breaker and monitor hybrid and serverless infrastructure. The CNCF curates and promotes open-source projects that enable modern, cloud-native applications. The industry now moves toward the adoption of projects in the CNCF landscape to quickly build open-source, cloud-native, LCNC tools, and agnostic applications.

Modern practices (microservices, monitoring, logging), packaging (containerization, orchestration), and automation (DevOps-based pipelines) are crucial to cloud-native solution delivery. The CNCF acts as a repository for trusted open-source projects such as Kubernetes, HELM, Jaeger, and Istio that are used in several deployments today.

Enterprises must work toward standardizing cloud-native development. The CNCF cloud-native landscape is a good reference to identify and use appropriate building blocks. Technology leaders like Google,Microsoft, Amazon, and Cisco are members of the CNCF. Microsoft's recent distributed application runtime (DAPR) framework (a portable, event-driven runtime building block for microservices) already incorporates the CNCF interactive landscape to help build cloud-native solutions.

An American consumer goods corporation partnered with Infosys to modernize and develop a next-generation handheld platform for in-store order capturing and customer experience services. The platform followed an API-driven and domain-led design approach. It was developed using cloud-native, containerized microservices, and event mesh technology stacks. The solution was designed, built, and rolled out to sales representatives in just 16 months, reducing overhead costs in running handheld devices and enabling real time integration of data and insights. The platform was expanded to run in an Active-Active mode to achieve higher efficiency and meet growing business demands. It also enhanced resiliency for disaster management and data recovery.

Architecture and design

Trend 2: New application layer protocols replace HTTP REST for greater efficiency

Hyperscaler adoption has enhanced focus on security, performance, lightweight containers, and availability. The APIs and microservices should support the hybrid user interface/user experience ecosystem in addition to serverless solutions. This has brought a new requirement to look beyond TCP/IP, HTTP protocols. Previously, interservice communications in the microservices world were primarily REST, despite their complexity and inefficiencies in certain use cases. Microservices solutions increasingly use new application layer protocols like Google's Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) and RSocket for improved security and lightweight deployment images to support serverless needs.

Modern cloud-native systems need to support multiple application protocols in the context of use-case needs. A good example of a mixed implementation is the use of potentially different application protocols in query (REST/HTTP) and response (GraphQL) flows. A mix of application protocols (REST/gRPC/GraphQL) help improve efficiencies. Additionally, soon application protocols based on HTTP/3 will also be a part of the broader pool protocols.

Infosys partnered with a manufacturing giant to architect and develop a multicloud microservices platform. The solution involved various modern application layer protocols other than HTTP REST (gRPC, event messaging) to integrate with services across the landscape.