In recent years, an agile and flexible business approach has become increasingly important. This is reflected in all areas of professional life, including through the software companies utilize. Newer, more readily adaptable and resilient platforms, such as microservices and PBCs, are now preferred over larger, off-the-shelf monolithic options. Below, we break down these three major platform types.
In recent years, the need for an agile business approach has become increasingly important. As customer expectations have grown and the business landscape has become less predictable, ensuring adaptability is a key objective for many corporations.
This need for speed and flexibility is also reflected in the software that companies utilize. One-size-fits-all systems no longer provide the versatility required for modern business, largely due to their limited customization and lack of features for niche use cases.
One way these new attitudes are reflected is through the move away from monolithic e-commerce platforms to microservices or PBCs. Although these terms have been in use for years, businesses without a firm understanding of their meaning are limited in successfully applying them to operations.
To help understand how these approaches can help your corporation, we’ve provided a rundown of monoliths, microservices, and PBCs below. You’ll find details of each approach, arming you with an expert overview of some of the most cutting-edge software approaches.
In a monolithic platform, software is built as a single, indivisible unit. Monolithic software is one big codebase, meaning all of its functions are managed and served in one place. This usually comprises of a client-side user interface, a server-side application, and a database.
Services – for example, product labels, product attributes, and product options – are all combined into a single program on a single platform. If the code for one service needs updating, the code for the full tech stack will also be updated.
Monoliths are the default way of producing applications, but they’re fast going out of fashion. These large, inflexible solutions take a lot of time and money to update, change or extend due to a number of reasons:
Whilst monolithic architecture is built on a single, unified codebase, microservice platforms split an application into smaller, independent, loosely coupled components. Each of these components is a microservice and undertakes its specific, individual, and granular process separately.
Services – product labels, product attributes, and product options – are all independent but loosely coupled on the same platform. If one service needs updating, the update can take place to that specific service alone without affecting the functionality of other services.
Microservices are much more flexible than monoliths as each service can be extended, updated, or modified without altering the other services in the platform. Like monoliths though, they can require substantial time and effort when implementing developments:
As the name PBC suggests, Packaged Business Capabilities target well-defined, specific business tasks and are built around providing a specific business function. They are formed of collections of functionalities that communicate via APIs. PBCs differ from microservices, which don’t often serve a recognizable business capability.
Groups of services – returning to our previous examples of product labels, product attributes, and product options – are coded as a bound collection, creating a PBC. In our case, this PBC would be Product Information Management (PIM).
Gartner predicts that 30% of digital commerce organizations will use PBCs to construct their application experiences by 2024. Due to these benefits, PBCs cut down on in-house resources, meaning teams outside of tech can hold more of a stake in the development of digital products.
Check our Expert’s Guide to Composable Commerce!