Innovative architecture based on Quarkus for the management of Uruguay's public finances

Montevideo, June 23, 2023.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance of Uruguay (MEF), together with Sofis Solutions, carried out the update of the architecture of the Integrated Financial Information System (SIIF), an action that is part of the agency's modernization process and will streamline and improve its efficiency.

The Integrated Financial Information System (SIIF) of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Uruguay (MEF) is a software system that facilitates the recording, monitoring, and evaluation of Uruguay's public budgetary and financial operations. SIIF is based on Oracle Forms, which presents certain challenges such as limited compatibility, high maintenance costs, and restricted support. To ensure long-term viability and modernization, an architectural update is required. The agency began a modernization process involving a redesign of the reference architecture so that it would be scalable, incorporate the latest practices related to observability, enable integration with external systems, be secure, allow development and deployment practices based on DevOps, and comply with current information technology regulations.

The team responsible for the update relied on the Architecture Development Method (ADM) TOGAF 9.2, which allows the identification and modeling of potential risks for the organization and explores different approaches to eliminate or reduce them. In this way, progress is made toward a microservices-based architecture, with a technological solution incorporating Quarkus as the backend framework.

Quarkus was created to enable Java developers to build applications for a modern, cloud-native world. It is a framework that makes Java an effective platform for serverless architecture, microservices, and orchestrated containers.

Key features include:

• Use of popular Java standards, frameworks, and libraries such as Eclipse MicroProfile, Apache Kafka, RESTEasy (JAX-RS), Hibernate ORM (JPA), JUnit, among others.
• Provides multiple development conveniences, such as Live Code Reload and Dev-UI.
• Native compilation of applications is possible using GraalVM, drastically reducing startup times and memory consumption.
• Allows combining imperative and reactive (non-blocking) code.
• Open-source project led by RedHat, with a very active community contributing both to the core product and an ecosystem of extensions called Quarkiverse.

In the Quarkus success story, key aspects of this architecture and the contributions to the community generated by the project are highlighted: MEF and Sofis use Quarkus as core component of a new innovative architecture