Communications of the ACM
How to Transition Incrementally to Microservice Architecture
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Revenue cycle management (RCM) is a complicated process that involves several steps and considerable data flow. A software development organization (SDO) that was building an RCM application quickly realized the complexity of this task. Specifically, the cyclomatic complexity of the application was in the thousands. The SDO could not easily scale the application or add features without having an impact on the entire code base.
Key Insights
In the early 2000s, no clear means was available to overcome this challenge until, per the suggestion of a consultant, the SDO began to discuss how to simplify the system by isolating the RCM steps into smaller, independent services. Later, this idea became known as microservice architecture (MSA), which has recently been touted as a promising software architecture alternative. Generally, an architecture style denotes a plausible and reusable pattern of solutions, backed by experience, to a set of known programming problems.10 The architecture conveys a highly abstracted conceptual model of structure and behavior of the software, given its design goals and constraints. The choice of the architecture has an impact on the ways the software will be implemented and how its development can be organized. A judiciously chosen architecture style helps reduce technical debt and enhances software efficiency and quality.9
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