5 Reactive Microservices Use Cases

That Power Business Innovation

5 Reactive Microservices
Use Cases That Power
Business Innovation
Introduction
No matter what industry you’re in, business innovation now depends on
your company’s ability to build digital services and software more quickly
and at higher quality—and to deliver those applications and services
reliably at scale. However, simply “lifting and shifting” your software to
cloud native infrastructure (i.e., Kubernetes and its ecosystems of tools)
is not enough. This approach will not deliver new applications fast enough
or achieve the necessary cadence of new features and improvements
without negatively impacting your organization’s KPIs.

Reactive microservices are an innovative and resource-efficient way to

design software systems. Built on Reactive Principles, they take the
complexity out of developing cloud native applications while unleashing
the full power of microservices in the cloud. Reactive microservices
handle the application layer of cloud native applications by implementing
an enterprise-grade microservices architecture—or an architecture that
meets the challenges of demanding distributed workloads.

Transformation takes thoughtful strategy with specific business impact in

mind. Knowing what business use cases other companies are putting into
best practice is a great way to start envisioning—and enabling—your own
shift to Reactive microservices.

Read on to discover five of the top use cases Lightbend has witnessed,
with real-world customer examples and insights into how your
organization can make the leap.

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1 A large bank optimizes the best auto loans for customers in record time
As a major provider of auto loans in the United States, Capital One wanted to upgrade their

Real-Time auto loan system to provide accurate decisions in real-time while improving the overall car
shopping experience for customers. Another major goal for the company was to simplify the
Financial Processes car shopping process by allowing customers to find, finance, and fulfill their next car purchase
with ease, convenience, and confidence.
Batch-oriented, big data solutions — such Driving Capital One’s new auto loan system are Reactive microservices powered by Akka
as Hadoop — are effective at processing a Platform. The results?
lot of data using popular machine learning
algorithms. However, the results are usually • The architecture can now • With Reactive • This new system can
stale by hours or even days. These solutions run complex applications microservices as handle a computing
lack an ability to harness big data and process supporting up to 16 the foundation, the task that normally
it at high speeds as the data is being generated simultaneous users at architecture can process takes 55 hours in
or entering an ecosystem — what is referred to 180 to 200 millisecond 486 applications a just under one second—
as streaming data. with 24/7 availability at
response times, delivering minute compared to at
massive scale
new features more quickly most 100 on a cluster of
Streaming data applications often run forever
with fewer failures servers before
and process a never-ending amount of data.
As a result, they require even higher levels
of resilience, elasticity, and availability that
only reactive microservices can provide. No one likes waiting, especially for loan approvals. So
Reactive microservices play an important when my team needed to upgrade our auto financing
role in laying a strong foundation for real-time loan origination systems for real-time decision making
financial processes. And even better, this
at high scale, we brought in Akka Platform to create a
system architecture allows Financial Services
companies to retain current customers, attract brand new customer experience.
the next generation of clients, maximize the Fred Crable, Senior Director of Software Development
retained value of relationships, and effectively
manage risk.

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2 A major telco doubles overall business and performance results using half
the hardware
Modern eCommerce For more than a decade, Verizon had to recreate their entire eCommerce site in parallel with a
special light code base that disabled logging, removed all complex transaction requirements,
Consumers demand to seamlessly transact and was subjected to massive load testing. This bespoke web site only ran in production for a
anywhere, anytime, on any client. Every sale few days each year, even though it took more than six months to create.
is the culmination of potentially dozens Verizon decided to revamp this legacy site to meet growing customer demand after
of interactions with a consumer. Today,
experiencing regular outages during high-load events, such as iPhone launches and Black
smartphones alone influence 84% of
Friday sales promotions. Using Akka Platform, the company built Reactive microservices that
millennials’ purchases. Digital touchpoints
achieved results twice as fast as their original platform by:
impact 56% of all purchases. Selling something
to an end consumer is far more complicated • Increasing developer • Decreasing infrastructure • Accelerating time to
than it used to be, even just 10 years ago. productivity so that build resources so that total value which led to a 235%
Consumers are firmly in charge and expect to times used 50% less hardware use was cut increase in sales, while
make purchases on their terms. developer effort in half customer conversion
rates jumped up 197%,
Reactive microservices can deliver the high- reducing customer
performance, scalability, and resilience required response times by half
to meet today’s demanding eCommerce
platforms head-on. This system architecture
allows companies to: The Akka Platform is absolutely phenomenal. The
• Deliver new features to market faster performance and user experience benefits generated
• Scale a platform up and down predictably by the implementation of Reactive systems was so
and elastically on-demand, across cores, impressive that it’s now being considered for adoption
nodes, and clusters by other business units within Verizon.
• Create entire systems of microservices that Neeraj Garg, Director of Billing & Ordering Systems
are responsive and message-driven

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3 An online fantasy sports platform reduces costs to serve fast growing market
Known to amplify fans’ engagement with sports, Dream11 has experienced tremendous

Infrastructure growth, from 1 million users in 2014 to over 80 million at the close of 2019. With the majority
of user traffic spiking the hour leading up to a real-world event, their original application
Optimization architecture could no longer process the tens of thousands of users per second requesting to
join contests associated with a single event, let alone overlapping events.
Cloud applications require a different software After extensive analysis and research, Dream11 decided that Reactive microservices powered
architecture from what companies have by Akka Platform could fulfill all their requirements. Since implementing this architecture, the
been running on for the past couple decades. company has experienced:
Traditional monolithic and batch types of
applications are not designed to take advantage • Faster time to value by delivering its new • A 30% reduction in infrastructure costs
of the cloud and are extremely inefficient, Contest Join application one full month
resulting in high cloud costs. The same is true ahead of schedule • The scalability to grow at any rate
for poorly-designed microservices applications. of adoption for years to come, while
• An increase in performance levels to more delivering the uninterrupted experience
The long-term impact of running legacy and than 30,000 user joins per second at customers expect to receive
lift-and-shift applications in cloud environments 150ms latency less than one week after
is cost prohibitive. While it is essential any cloud launch—well exceeding original goals
applications are secure, reliable, and scalable, it
is critical these applications are highly efficient
to keep costs from running over budget. The Akka Platform provides a reduction of infrastructure
only way to ensure business workloads realize
and associated cost savings that enable our teams
cost savings while taking full advantage of a new
cloud infrastructure is to design an application to place focus on building features that attract new
architecture containing Reactive microservices, customers and enhance user experiences.
coupled with a flexible orchestration capability
using containers and Kubernetes. Mahesh Jadhav, Software Architect

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4 Hyper-personalized user experiences for a streaming service and its viewers

Partnering with over 250 media companies, Tubi has more than 30,000 movies and TV

Application shows globally. However, as Tubi’s popularity grew, the development team was working
around the clock trying to scale the existing systems with more hardware. Simultaneously,
Modernization the development team was trying to improve the user experience by adding layers of machine
learning-driven recommendations to further individualize the customer experience.
Much of the discussion about application Tubi was in search of a single platform that could keep up with the company’s fast pace of
modernization is focused on monolithic, on- innovation and be implemented quickly to keep pace with business goals. They selected Akka
premises applications—typically updated Platform to build Reactive microservices that take full advantage of the distributed nature of
and maintained using waterfall development
the cloud, are resilient to failure, automatically scale up and down, and are highly responsive.
processes—and how those applications can
Outcomes included:
be brought into cloud architecture and release
patterns, namely microservices. • An increase in development velocity while • A better monitoring of services in
attaining the expertise, and confidence, production and a rich set of metrics used
The key to success with application
to quickly solve complex issues that arise for smart alerting in production systems
modernization, like most things, comes
during development • A quick debugging of complex
down to strategy and picking application
modernization projects where the benefits of interdependencies in the rare cases that
cloud, speed, performance, scale, and new issues do arise
feature development are ones that offer the
given application a clear path to improved
customer experience and ROI. Reactive With Akka Platform, Tubi is now able to deliver a unique
microservices meet these requirements while level of hyper-personalization that resonates with our
offering more independence between services,
viewers’ individual tastes and advertiser solutions
making development cycles more rapid and
cost effective. needed by the world’s leading brands.

Mario Assistis, CTO

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5 A storied enterprise IT company delivers customer value faster with

real-time insights
Internet of Things Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has sensors deployed in data centers all around the globe
sending trillions of metrics each day to InfoSight, an industry-leading predictive analytics platform
(IoT) Platforms providing analytics on petabytes of telemetry data. However, to deliver value faster, InfoSight
needed to evolve from its classic batch mode, big data architecture to streaming data.
For developers, an IoT platform provides a set HPE turned to Akka Platform and Reactive microservices for the elasticity and resilient self
of ready-to-use features that greatly speed up healing required to deliver streaming data. The business benefits the company has experienced
development of applications for connected
since implementing the platform include:
devices as well as handle scalability and cross-
device compatibility. Modern IoT platforms go one • Delivering near real-time • Transforming customers’ • Increasing developer
step further and introduce a variety of valuable insights to customers experience by monitoring productivity with
features into the hardware and application layers using data gathered from infrastructure, predicting frameworks for
such as real-time analytics, on-device data over 20 billion sensors possible problems, and processing continuous
processing, and cloud-based deployment. sending trillions of recommending ways to application logic
metrics each day enhance performance
Digital twins — or a comprehensive digital
representation of real-world devices and
systems — improve state monitoring and
enable faster responses to external and internal Lightbend delivers on the elasticity and resilience we
events. Implementation requires IoT platforms require. When they packaged Akka Platform into a
to provide highly-flexible device management
de facto streaming data distribution, it made good
capabilities that can cope with any level of
sophistication depending on the use case. business sense to use their platform for the next
Digital twins built with Reactive microservices generation of InfoSight.
are becoming a key ingredient of every efficient
Jeff Dutton, Data Platform Architect
IoT ecosystem.

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How Reactive Microservices
Drive Business Value Overall
Beyond the specific use cases in this ebook, Reactive microservices offer significant Lightbend is the company behind the Akka
advantages for your IT and development efforts in the cloud, contributing directly to the Platform, used by development teams for
success of your business. building highly scalable and resilient back-
end services using reactive systems of
Reactive microservices unlock new use cases and benefits specific to just about every
microservices and real time data streaming
industry, but a few of the most common are:
pipelines. These services power business-
• Reducing business risk, • Giving companies back • Encouraging critical cloud native applications and our
accelerating faster time control over developing reusability and customers include many Global 2000
to value, and lowering business features instead eliminating business enterprises such as Apple, BP, Capital One,
infrastructure costs of spending precious function redundancy Disney, ING, Schlumberger, Starbucks, Tesla
time and money writing and Verizon. Lightbend is now introducing
boilerplate code and Akka Serverless, a powerful platform enabling
building frameworks
any developer to easily build the same type
of scalable, high-performance, stateful back-
Many companies have invested in microservices, but true transformation at hyper scale
end services used by those innovation leaders
does not happen without Reactive Principles being core to the way software systems
but now with a simple API-driven, serverless,
operate, driving strategic initiatives from a centralized architecture.
database-less model.
For more on the journey to Reactive microservices, read:
To learn more, please visit:
Microservices Unleashed: Evolving Mission-Critical Applications at www.lightbend.com
Lower Cost, Risk, and Complexity →
Download additional resources at:
www.lightbend.com/resources