Many insurance software applications, such as property and casualty (P&C) insurance applications, are built as monolithic applications, and this has led to several performance challenges in the past.
A prominent risk with monolithic applications is that a failure in one part of the application usually impacts the entire software application. Also, the different functionalities in monolith applications requires different programming and technical needs to facilitate change and this can lead to challenges when insurance businesses choose to scale.
Transitioning, or even incorporating, microservices into insurance applications can bring with it numerous advantages. Some benefits include:
- Scalability: Sometimes, insurance companies need to scale only one of their offerings, and not the entire operation. With microservices, this is possible since the microservice for that offering can be scaled easily and cost effectively without impacting other operations.
- Supports Distributed Teams: Insurance companies can have teams distributed across several geographic locations. With microservices, each team can work on a different feature and then unify communication between each of these microservices.
- Quick Time to Market: Since microservices are developed independently, they can be released to market as soon as they are ready or upgraded. This significantly cuts time in half when compared to having to wait for a completed monolith to be released at once. This is particularly good for Customer Experience (CX) platforms.
- Reusability: Mircoservices are reusable, meaning there is no need to build an entire software application from the ground up if one is already in successful production.
For P&C insurance companies to truly optimize benefits offered by microservices, a thoughtful and incremental approach to the migration process must be considered. This is advised because it allows a tiered completion approach to all the existing features and functionalities of the monolith be extracted and developed as microservices – each microservice is developed one at a time. This way, newly created microservices coexist with the gigantic monolith until all the features are completely extracted and it is phased out.
Choosing the right partner company that can properly assist with microservices migration is paramount. Penguin.Tech offers leading microservices solutions for property and casualty insurance companies. Penguin.Tech’s signature product – API Kayak – offers a proven approach to the robust and quick implementation of cloud-based microservices.
Penguin.Tech also offers a regression system that can help migrate even the most complicated monolith to a microservices architecture.
