Vanarama

Microservices Architecture

“Tech Amigos began by devising a framework solution for a new digital platform, using AWS cloud services which could be developed, deployed and scaled independently and help safeguard from downstream failure”

Jamie Buchanan, CTO

Outcomes Delivered

  • Domain driven design to decompose the monolith into smaller functional domain 

  • Example Ruby on Rails based microservice application that supported containerisation

  • Docker setup, immutable artefact builds, ECR based image repository and standardised build/deploy pipelines. 

The Challenge

Autorama consulted Tech Amigos (TA) to provide some strategic direction to transition away from a monolithic platform which supported its web brands. Challenges included:

  • Legacy Technology platform did not provide business agility

  • Inability to make changes at small scope with lower risk 

  • Inability to scale at the component or service level 

Making a transition from monolith architecture to modular as represented below

     Technologies

    • Docker, AWS ECS
    • AWS SSM based secrets management
    • Autoscaling ECS cluster
    • Github Actions for build pipelines
    • Harness based CD pipelines 

     The Solution

    Establishing Cloud Microservices for New Digital Platform

    Microservices support Autorama’s business functions and form the basis for its new AWS cloud-hosted digital platform. The cloud strategy has involved a transitional programme to gradually introduce these into production and finally retire the legacy platform. Ultimately, microservices aim to further business agility.

    Here’s a summary of some microservices…

    Customers Microservice

    TA created a cloud strategy to migrate customer data from across brands to a centralised database, managed by an API-based Customers microservice. This makes it easier to manage GDPR and integration with HubSpot supports Vanarama’s marketing, sales and customer service teams. TA have also guided automating the quotation process within the online customer journey to help improve the “quote to renewal” process.

    Vehicles Microservice

    The Vehicles microservice retrieves technical vehicle data with pricing, from an external database. It then publishes this to the headless CMS so it can be served to the front-end website. Managing pricing has been decoupled from content and is now wholly automated by the Vehicles microservice, with RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

    Orders Microservice

    A single view of order for customers was the key requirement that gave motivation for this service, e.g. introduction of ‘My Account’ section, for the front-end, where customers can upload documents. This overcomes the need for the Customer Services team to reach out to customers for documents. An order status automator sits between the funder systems and the Orders microservice to provide updates to the customer. A further stage has involved automating document checks and uploads to funder platforms, which has helped reduce manual tasks for Customer Service.

    Vanarama is an award-winning personal and commercial vehicle leasing company