Challenges and Considerations of Architectural Patterns for Payment Solutions

Sammanfattning

There is a growing trend in the industry towards adopting microservice architectures due to their flexibility, scalability, and ease of maintenance compared to traditional monolithic patterns [1]. One of the main reasons to move away from more traditional, monolithic patterns, is to address their increasing complexity as the codebase and system grows, making it difficult to maintain and update the code regularly [2]. Partially or completely migrating architecture away from monolithic patterns comes with many challenges however, such as the need for experienced developers, a proven development method, careful testing and extensive refactoring of the code [3]. In this paper, we investigate possible solutions for an e-commerce company wishing to implement a new payment solution on their platform, using the Swedish bank Klarna as the platform's new Payment Service Provider (PSP). Two opposing architectural patterns are proposed for the integration: a traditional monolithic implementation, in keeping with the platform’s current codebase, or the building of a separate microservice system for the PSP component. In this paper, an examination of the challenges and considerations for each proposed solution is made, through the use of artefact creation. Artefacts representing each architectural solution were designed, built and evaluated using a Design Science Research methodology. The artefacts demonstrated successful leverage of each architecture, while also identifying the challenges that were associated with them. A monolithic implementation proved to be advantageous where resources are tight, achieving a high level of security with minimal effort. The microservices pattern showed increased attack resistance however, albeit requiring a greater investment in planning and resources.