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Essay: Microservice Architecture: Advantages, Challenges, and Key Design Issues

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  • Subject area(s): Sample essays
  • Reading time: 3 minutes
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  • Published: 1 February 2018*
  • Last Modified: 23 July 2024
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 625 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 3 (approx)

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Microservice architecture style is gaining more and moretraction each day being the most chosen architecture by com-panies creating new enterprise applications due to advantagessuch as [insert advantages + references].Due  to  these  advantages,  there  is  clarity  in  the  fact  thatArchitecture  has  a  crucial  role  in  the  software  lifecycle,  inorder to ensure quality and critical attributes of the software.[c23]While the microservices architecture has many definitionseach  trying  to  better  describe  the  concept,  the  author  ofthis paper chose to adhere to the Martin Fowler’s definition[c1]  which  describe  this  architectural  style  as  building  anapplication  as  a  group  of  services  each  designed  for  a  spe-cific business capability, intercommunicating via lightweightmechanisms while being independently deployable. The con-cepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) constitute thebase  for  Microservice  Architecture  (MSA)  which  borrowsthe  idea  of  componentization  in  small  services  designedusing  bounded  contexts  to  merge  correlated  functionalities[c8] and agile development style with DevOps practices forcontinuous  integration  and  delivery,  while  keeping  the  datamanagement  and  interaction  of  the  services  decentralized.MSA has different policy in regards to the sharing philosophybeing  more  focused  on  isolation  and  autonomy  relying  onchoreography,  while  SOA  focuses  on  reusability  relying  onorchestration. [c2]Notwithstanding  the  existing  research  in  the  area  of  mi-croservices, strong interface boundaries and considering theappropriate  granularity,  proper  automatic  deployment  andtesting tools, still persist as challenges inherited from SOA.The  identification  of  ”good”  microservices  does  not  focusonly  on  partitioning  the  system  for  easy  maintenance,  butalso  describes  the  evolution  of  the  system  and  its  scalingcapabilities.An  important  design  issue  that  has  to  be  considered  inMSA  is  the  functionality  each  service  possesses,  that  hasto be carefully split/allocated with the appropriate granular-ity.  In  accordance  with  Conway’s  Law  [c6],  organizationsusually produce system architectures/designs that mirror theorganization’s  communication  patterns.  This  usually  occursin  practice,  the  natural  flow  of  interaction  between  thedevelopers or the teams developing a software product, beingembedded  in  the  calls/interaction/communication  betweenthe microservices/components.(This   approach   encourage   developers   to   deliver   qual-ity  attributes  in  which  there  are  no  communication  flaws.[c22][c21] ?)Issues  present  in  the  old  monolithic  architecture  such  asthe  system  becoming  highly  coupled,  hard  to  maintain  andenrich  with  new  features,  can  be  overcame  by  migrating  toMSA, a more and more adopted option for resolving existingissues (without major cost related implications), while aidingthe  system  maintainability  and  the  rate  at  which  softwareproducts are delivered. [c19]From  [c24]  we  discover  that  automated  testing  is  thesecond most arose issue in regards to the migrating process.Regarding the architecture, the main issues identified are (1)high coupling (2) service boundaries identification dilemmas,and (3) system decomposition, [c24] in this context referringto decomposition around business capabilities. Furthermore,the decomposition process aid the architecture via reducingthe number of layers and forcing microservice’s focus aroundeach  business  functionality,  on  top  of  which  a  lightweightcommunication layer is added for integration of the resultedmicroservices.STATE GOAL OF PAPERAs  service  composition  is  a  recurring  issue  in  the  processof  designing  a  MSA  [3]  as  well  as  the  absence  of  a  soundmethodology  to  assess  the  quality  of  microservice-orienteddecompositions [4] (combined with the fact that architectureimpact  analysis  is  an  unexplored  area  [3]),  it  is  safe  to assume that with all recent developments in automatizing themigration  process,  the  validation  of  resulted  microservicesstill lacks a clear set of quality criteria. Therefore, thegoalof  this  literature  study  survey  consists  of  the  identificationof  a  minimum  comprehensive  set  of  quality  assessmentcriteria   deemed   applicable   to   all   microservices   resultedfrom  migrating  a  monolithic  application  to  this  emergentarchitectural style.STATE CONTRIBUTIONSThe   contributions   of   the   author   in   this   literature   studysurvey  consists  of  an  refinement  of  the  already  proposedvalidation  criteria  for  microservices  throughout  the  existingresearch,  also  taking  into  consideration  the  requirementsof   an   automatic   validation   framework   (based   on   staticanalysis?).  According  to  [c16]  In  this  research,  we  definemicroservice  testing  as  microservice  validation,  because  ingeneral  it  is  impossible  to  apply  static  testing  methods  tothe compiled microservice.EXPLAIN THE SECTIONS THAT FOLLOW

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