Web Services & Microservices

The strangler-fig approach means the legacy system keeps running untouched while services come online beside it; each increment is independently testable and reversible. The first task order can be bounded to a single interface with fixed-price acceptance criteria, so the agency's exposure is one small, verifiable deliverable, not a program.

This scope is separable, and separating it is often faster than modifying the incumbent's contract. Avalon builds the interface layer to specs the incumbent's systems consume, with ICDs and OpenAPI contracts making the handshake explicit, complement, not replacement.

SOA-era failures were mostly governance and topology failures, heavyweight central ESBs, committee-driven canonical data models, vendor-locked middleware. The modern approach inverts those choices: lightweight protocols, decentralized data ownership, contract-first specs, and CI/CD as the governance mechanism.

You don't authorize them one at a time. One authorization boundary can contain many services; platform-level common controls are inherited by every service on them, so each new service adds a thin delta of system-specific evidence, not a new package.

We state plainly what we have and haven't done as a firm. What we bring instead: named individuals' documented delivery history, performance on adjacent Avalon services where it exists, fixed-price structure with verifiable acceptance criteria, and a deliberately small first increment.

They make change faster and add operational complexity, without a pipeline and monitoring they can make things worse. We say this out loud; it's the setup for right-sizing the scope, not a sales pitch.

The status quo, shared database logins, file drops, and manual transfer between systems, is the unmanaged attack surface. A gateway-fronted API is the version of that access that is authenticated, authorized, rate-limited, and logged.