Serverless Microservice Reference Architecture

This reference architecture walks you through the decision-making process involved in designing, developing, and delivering the onboarding platform by HRcloud (a fictitious company). The goal is to provide you with practical hands-on experience in working with several integral cloud services and technologies that effectively are used in building serverless-based microservice architectures. We hope to illuminate how serverless can be leveraged for both large-scale and small solutions, and give you the confidence to apply this solution to your most important projects.

Client Scenario

HRcloud is a human resources service provider focused on offering customizable and scalable solutions to a variety of sectors. They are focused on capitalizing on the fast-paced growth of the booming cloud industry and leveraging advances in technology to meet complex challenges in employee recruitment. HRcloud has a track record of providing a client-focused approach that provides both job seekers and employers with a high-touch service model. Their ongoing commitment has led to their latest endeavor that seeks to set a new standard for onboarding a distributed and remote workforce. The platform is device-optimized and removes the complexity of completing tasks on the go.

Source: IBM Serverless Report

The company’s technical leadership continuously keeps tabs on the rapidly growing technology industry and new innovations that can be built on top of their fully-managed services platform. They are not interested in maintaining infrastructure, as they feel their team’s time is best spent working towards their mission and their core strength: rapidly developing new and innovative features that can scale to meet demand.

Like many other technical leaders, they are keen on learning the top strategic technology trends that will enable their team to deliver growth, digitalization, and efficiency and position their products for long-term competitive advantage.

In the constant pursuit of faster, simpler, and more cost-effective ways to deliver app functionality and service development, HRcloud turned to serverless computing. This modern approach offers extremely high performance and flexibility at scale with additional promises of:

• Consumption-based pricing
• Prototype and develop faster
• Reduce the amount of code and configuration required
• Scale resources to meet demand automatically
• Focus more on the functionality and features of the solution

During the pandemic, HRcloud also found that using serverless platforms was a powerful way to get the most out of their top technical talent, and was effective at keeping the developers they already had happy and engaged. This confidence gives them dreams of releasing a wildly popular new HR platform and enjoying near-instantaneous client growth. During their initial discovery/research phase consisting of comparing serverless offerings, code, and product reviews, and creating rapid prototypes, HRcloud decided to build their onboarding platform.

HRcloud built its platform on Azure's serverless components. They also explored microservice patterns for their solution design, API management, and other key components. Transparent monitoring is an important capability that was instilled from the very start. Automatic documentation and an easy communication pipeline were set up to keep track of all the components involved. Finally, they simplified the lifecycle management of all these pieces by applying DevOps practices to automate continuous integration and deployment, end-to-end.

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