Design and Evaluation of a Microservice Architecture for a Fractional Real Estate Investment Platform

Sammanfattning

This thesis designs and evaluates a microservice-based architecture for a fractional real estate investment platform within the fintech domain. The study addresses limitations of monolithic systems in scalability, modularity, and maintainability by proposing a distributed system composed of independent services coordinated through an API Gateway. A design science approach is used, where the architecture is implemented as a minimum viable product and evaluated through empirical experiments. The evaluation compares key architectural decisions, including local authentication versus OAuth 2.0, static JSON versus API-based data access, client-side rendering performance, and system scalability under load. Results show clear trade-offs between performance and architectural flexibility. The proposed microservice architecture improves modularity and scalability but introduces communication overhead and increased complexity. The study concludes that microservice architectures are a suitable architectural approach for fintech systems when service boundaries and communication patterns are carefully designed, based on the observed behaviour in the implemented MVP and experimental environment.