# Micro services at Bankin’ -  Introduction

### **Genesis**

We started Bankin’ while we were still in school  -  the first lines of codes were dropped in class. It was obvious at the time, and the right choice, to start with a monolithic structure. First of all « microservices » as we define them today didn’t exist and more importantly, I was the only developer. **Keep things simple.**

Security and stability of this monolithic codebase has always been strong, so why moving into such a new and unknown path? Following the hype?

We’ve never been a huge fan of hype followers. There is no shiny languages in our codebase (99% Java on our backend). Hype is a big red flag in our hiring process.

But our company did experience (and still do) a fast and exponential growth - and so does our codebase.

### **So why Micro Services?**

1.  With a growing team, a growing codebase and very-fast growing databases, maintaining and developing features has become a more delicate and complex operation\*\*.\*\*
    

2\. Bankin’ is based on data. All the data at Bankin’ are strictly personal and can’t be accessed by our developers, but it must be enriched. Our core business is to enhance our users’ data to make it comprehensible and actionable for them. On a monolithic project, manipulating data seems easy (everything is kept together), but working with huge datasets, that you can’t access, without having side impacts on the rest of your features is quite another story.

Micro Services (executed well) have helped us solve those two development pain points.

### **What’s next?**

We have been implementing micro services since the end of 2016 and have now a strong comprehension of how and what they can help us to achieve  -  and this is bigger than what we expected.

In a following series of articles we’ll detail how we are working on this architecture migration. What are the biggest mistake we made while implementing it, and our biggest success also.

And if you want to help us and our 2M+ users, [do not hesitate to apply and join our backend team](https://www.welcometothejungle.co/companies/bankin/jobs)  -  based in Paris.

See you for the next episode.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ekNmYoNBfqsJClJKRRBQQw.jpeg align="center")