As the third generation systems struggled to carve up their monoliths, and facing increasing pressure from the market to ‘move to the cloud’, vendors often employ a lift and shift strategy taking their monolithic app server, containerizing it and deploying it on the cloud. Whereas this technically qualifies as a cloud strategy we could argue it isn’t a very effective one, we haven’t leveraged any of the benefits of being on the cloud, notably, elastic scalability - we are essentially dealing with the same monolith, but now in a more expensive data centre!

Building on this it might seem that conditions are ripe for a new wave, a fourth generation of core banking systems that are built from ground up embracing the elastic scalability of the cloud by leveraging a microservice based architecture.