As part of this multi blog series, abhishek.kumar, sivaram.subbiah and monisha.madu will take you through building a microservices based application for solving the problems of a fictitious company Example Inc.
As part of our goal to learn SAP Cloud Platform, we have decided to document our journey. In order to make sure that we put a structure to this learning we have decided to build on a scenario as this would ensure that we are a bit closer to the real world problems which one tries to solve using SCP.
#Guiding Scenario
Example Inc is a fictitious company which runs malls in various parts of India. As off now they have a monolithic application which helps them managing their demands like rent collection, ticketing, payroll processing for their employees etc. As they are growing, they realize that there is a need to be more agile in delivering the needs of their business. In order to meet these needs, they have decided to move towards Microservices Architecture. Example Inc has decided that the next generation of their software should be available over cloud as they want to reduce their IT expenses and are no longer interested in managing the infrastructure on which their software runs. Example Inc is already a SAP customer, and hence is inclined towards using SAP Cloud Platform to deliver these services.
While Example Inc is struggling with multiple priorities, one of the new features the business needs is to correlate the shop rents with the footfalls which occur in the shop on a montly basis. The business has procured and installed sensors across all the malls and shops. These sensors can ping an endpoint in the cloud with every footfall that occurs, however due to lack of any service which can receive and make sense of this data for rental module in the monolith, the sensors investment is lying idle. The local controllers for these sensors can configure these endpoints and the authentication features on the physical sensors to start sending this data to the cloud. Each sensor can give the data in the form of a blip to a single URL. Example Inc has 532 malls with a total of 35316 shops across 232 cities. On the peak hours the footfalls for each mall can be anywhere between 10-80 people per minute, while on the weekdays it can be between 1-20 people per minute.
The Example Inc. plans to change the rental plans for the shop to have a fixed component and a variable component which relates to the number of footfalls a shop gets. While the fixed component is a function of space and prominence of the shop, the variable component is a function of footfalls and average invoice value of the merchandise available in the shop.
With the above fictional scenario which we have, we will now proceed to solution design and implementation of a few services using SAP Cloud Platform.
