Microservices herald the death of reskinning at Worldline

Modularity is a natural fit for an agile approach

For years, TV viewers have demanded an a la carte offering: the ability to pick and choose only the channels that they want to watch. For just as long, content owners have denied them on the grounds of lower revenue.

A similar trend has been running through IT since the beginning of this decade - but unlike the TV world, both vendors and customers have embraced microservices.

Some of the biggest draws of these types of services are that they are independently deployable, easy to replace and small in size. Their modular nature lends itself to the agile DevOps methodologies that IT departments are increasingly adopting.

E-payments business Worldline, which has been going through an extended period of digital transformation, is making a move towards microservices and what CTO Ryan Bryers calls "the API economy."

Bryers is passionate about agile

Reskinning - when companies want the experience that another company has built, with their own branding - is a personal bugbear of Bryers', especially then the skin becomes "a bottleneck and a handbrake."

"Samsung's a really good example," he said. "The Blueborne virus, WannaCry and every other major vulnerability, Google went ‘Whack - here's a fix'; but Samsung's fix [for Android] took three months."

He continued, "There'll always be some clients who are hesitant. They'll take the basic app, change the colour and put their own logo on it and be happy. You saw a lot of that for a while, especially in the transport providers; their booking engines all looked the same. There are others who want their own bespoke UI, but don't have the people to do it and ask us to."

In an effort to replace reskinning, Bryers is looking towards enabling API gateways and breaking down products into a microservices approach over the next year. By opting for modularity, companies won't need to say, ‘I want your product but I need to change 40 per cent of it to get what I want'. Instead, they can pick and choose specific parts of a technology suite.

"As long as they integrate together in a nice interface, why should I bother [with changing an existing product]?" Bryers asked.

The same applies to the backend, which all of Worldline's external routes in - the GUI, mobile apps, etc - now reach through API gateways.