API-fication process using API First methodology

Success story

Introduction

One of the leading companies in the energy sector needed to optimize the management of its solar panel offers—a process that had previously been carried out manually using Excel spreadsheets. This method was inefficient, error-prone, and difficult to scale, negatively affecting both operational efficiency and customer experience.

To address this challenge, a set of APIs was developed to automate the calculation and generation of offers. This project was crucial in advancing the department’s digitalization and modernization efforts, responding to the need for greater accuracy and agility in a constantly evolving sector. As a result, operations became more efficient, errors were reduced, and customer satisfaction improved thanks to a faster and more accurate offer management process.

Additionally, the number of customers interested in running simulations increased significantly, which greatly improved lead acquisition and, consequently, the number of new clients.

Starting point

Before the start of this project, the company faced several challenges related to the management and simulation of commercial offers. Simulation and offer-generation processes were handled through Excel documents, requiring continuous manual intervention. This approach was not only inefficient, but it also made integration with other corporate systems and platforms impossible, limiting agility and responsiveness to market demands.

Project's Goal

The main goal of the project was to design and develop a solution that would enable the management of simulations and commercial offers, allowing the company to operate more efficiently and with greater agility. To achieve this, the team adopted a microservices-based architecture implemented under an API-First methodology, enabling the creation of decoupled, reusable, and easily integrable services for third parties.

Dev Methodology

The project was carried out using an Agile approach, with a multidisciplinary team composed of developers, software architects, and DevOps experts. The API-First methodology played a key role, as it allowed the team to define and design the APIs from the outset, ensuring that all developed modules were consistent and aligned with business requirements.

Solution: Development of Modules

Calculation module

This module contains all calculation logic related to simulations and offers. Its purpose is to perform the complex computations required to generate accurate simulations and competitive offers.

Simulations module

Responsible for enabling real-time offer simulations. This module works closely with the Calculation Module to generate simulations based on different scenarios and parameters.

Offers module

In charge of generating and managing commercial offers. It ensures that each offer meets the defined criteria and is ready to be presented to customers.

Documents module

Manages all documentation associated with the offers, including the generation, storage, and retrieval of documents.

Technologies and Tools Used

The microservices were developed using Spring Boot and deployed in containers using Docker. AWS ECS was used as the deployment platform, along with other AWS services such as SES for messaging, S3 for document management, and Cognito as the IdP. Integration and deployment were automated through Jenkins pipelines, while infrastructure provisioning was handled using Terraform (Infrastructure as Code).

Project's Results

The final outcome of the project was the development of a series of decoupled APIs, each corresponding to a specific module. These APIs are highly integrable and can be consumed from multiple entry points, offering flexibility and scalability. The new infrastructure enables better management of simulations and offers, optimizing the generation process and ensuring greater accuracy and faster response times for customers.

Furthermore, the adoption of an Agile methodology and modern technologies significantly improved the development cycle, allowing the team to respond more effectively to changing requirements and market demands. Integration with AWS ensured scalability and security, while the microservices architecture simplified both maintenance and future system evolution.

In summary, the project not only solved the initial problems but also established a strong foundation for continuous and adaptable future development.

Areas of application

From the project described, several patterns and methodologies can be extracted that are highly reusable in other initiatives—not only solving specific issues, but also establishing a solid base for building scalable, maintainable, and adaptable solutions.

Microservices architecture is a key approach that divides an application into a set of small, autonomous, and specialized services, making maintenance, evolution, and independent scalability easier. Combined with the API-First methodology—which ensures API coherence and alignment with business needs—these approaches enable smooth and consistent interaction between different modules and systems.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is another fundamental pattern that automates infrastructure provisioning and management, ensuring consistency, minimizing human error, and enabling automated scaling. In this context, cloud deployment using services such as AWS provides scalability, security, and flexibility, allowing companies to quickly adapt to changing demands. Moreover, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), implemented through automated pipelines, improves software delivery speed and quality, reducing errors and facilitating the adoption of changes.

Containerization with Docker ensures application portability and consistency across different environments.

All these components, combined with an Agile methodology that promotes adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, form a set of practices and tools that can be applied to a wide variety of projects to create modern, flexible, and future-ready systems.