Industry Best Practices for Microservice Integration

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Riehle
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458284784

Microservice-based architectures are a new and promising type of software architecture. A microservice is a service that provides a business function to clients. Microservices are developed independently of each other, often by different teams, using different technology stacks for the purpose of improving (continuous) delivery speed. Where previously applications required full system replacement upon a change, microservices promise incremental delivery and hence increased innovation speed. Practitioners argue this increased delivery speed makes microservices a more suitable approach for building modern cloud applications than the more monolithic approaches from before. Even though they are decoupled, microservices need to communicate with each other, because the business functions they provide are often involved in workflows that go across all microservices. The integration of microservices is a topic that has seen not enough research yet. Studying the topic, we hope to make the design and implementation of microservices-based systems easier and more predictable. We propose to first perform theory building of how and why practitioners integrate microservices. We use the qualitative survey as our tried and proven research method for eliciting current best practices from industry. The result will be an initial theory of microservice integration that we plan to cast as a best practices handbook to support the practical application of our findings. We plan to evaluate the initial theory first by using participatory action research and then by using multiple-case case study research. In the participatory action research evaluation, we apply the best practices handbook together with an industry partner in one of their projects. The learnings from the action research will be fed back into the handbook. In the following case study research evaluation, we will provide the handbook to industry partners for use in their projects on their own. At the end of this study, we will have created a theory of microservices integration rooted in industry best practices and that has been vetted using both participatory action research and case study research. The methodological triangulation inherent in using two different methods for evaluating the theory will ensure a high quality of the research results and the casting of the theory in handbook form will ensure its industry relevance.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants