Microservices-Based Architecture Design for a Scalable SaaS SCM Portal
Customer
The Customer is a global provider of manufacturing and supply chain management services and software products. It is among America's fastest-growing private companies according to the Inc. 5000.
Need for a Scalable SCM Portal Architecture
The Customer was planning to build a comprehensive SaaS portal that would allow its users to manage all supply chain management processes in a single environment. The portal was to include the Customer's existing quality management SaaS app and any new SCM-related products.
Fully satisfied with our previous collaboration on BI development, the Customer entrusted the new project to ScienceSoft. Being already familiar with the Customer's infrastructure and data sources, ScienceSoft could start working on the portal design right away.
Designing and Building a Microservices-Based Architecture of a SCM Portal
For the project, ScienceSoft appointed a team of a project manager, a business analyst, a solution architect, and a DevOps engineer.
Our team opted for a microservices-based architecture. This approach would allow the Customer to easily expand the portal with new products without extra redevelopment efforts. ScienceSoft designed and implemented four microservices asynchronously connected through Azure Service Bus:
Identity microservice
This service enables user registration and access management, allowing the Customer and SaaS end users to set up admin and user roles at the portal and company levels. If a user is an employee of several companies, the system will generate a token with the necessary permissions depending on the user’s role in a certain company.
Document microservice
This service allows users to upload, download, and browse files. The files are uploaded to Azure Blob Storage via API, while file metadata (file name, date, owner) is kept in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Document indexer is used to update the metadata in the database.
Communication microservice
This service allows users to communicate on PO-related activities by leaving comments, answering and attaching files to them, and tagging users. The service is based on Azure CosmosDB to ensure resilient storage of constantly growing communication data.
Search microservice
This service allows users to search for information across all the PO-related communication threads and activities. It is based on Azure Cognitive Search that enables data indexing and supports fuzzy search, filters, and autocomplete suggestions.
Easily Scalable and Flexible SCM Portal Architecture
Within just 4 months, the Customer received a scalable microservices-based architecture for its SaaS portal. Due to its components' reusability, the architecture will easily fit the existing and new software products. In parallel, ScienceSoft was developing one of the portal's new components — an MVP of a purchase order management system.
Technologies and Tools
Azure, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Cognitive Search
