Microservice Reference Architecture for Deriving Application Architectures

Abstract

Microservice architecture (MSA) is an architectural style for distributed software systems, which promotes the use of fine-grained services with their own lifecycles. Several benefits of MSA have been reported in the literature, including increased autonomy and modularity, flexible configuration, easier development, easier maintenance, and increased productivity. Therefore, many practitioners leverage this architectural style either to break their existing big monolithic applications into small pieces or to start their new projects, in order to level up the agility of the development process and increase the autonomy of services. On the other hand, there are many concerns that the practitioners have to deal with, due to MSA’s distributed nature and design principles to consider. Therefore, it is still challenging for the practitioners to handle these concerns and come up with application architecture, and unfortunately, there is no comprehensive study yet to address this issue. To fill this gap, in this thesis, we propose a novel reference architecture together with an approach to derive an application architecture from it, as the keys to successfully building microservice-based applications. To this end, we first identify what kind of challenges are there in MSA adoption and then we follow a domain-driven software architecture design approach to identify basic features of MSA. We provide a domain model by using feature diagrams including the common and variant features of MSA. Leveraging the challenges and family feature model of MSA, we apply the architecture design process to design the reference architecture by using architectural viewpoints. Finally, after designing the reference architecture, we carry out a multiple case study to evaluate the proposed reference architecture.