Evaluating Service-Oriented and Microservice Architecture Patterns to Deploy eHealth Applications in Cloud Computing Environment

This article proposes a new framework for a Cloud-based eHealth platform concept focused on Cloud computing environments, since current and emerging approaches using digital clinical history increasingly demonstrate their potential in maintaining the quality of the benefits in medical care services, especially in computer-assisted clinical diagnosis within the field of infectious diseases and due to the worsening of chronic pathologies. Our objective is to evaluate and contrast the performance of the architectural patterns most commonly used for developing eHealth applications (i.e., service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices architecture (MSA)), using as reference the quantitative values obtained from the various performance tests and their ability to adapt to the required software attribute (i.e., versatile high-performance). Therefore, it was necessary to modify our platform to fit two architectural variants. As a follow-up to this activity, corresponding tests were performed that showed that the MSA variant functions better in terms of performance and response time compared to the SOA variant; however, it consumed significantly more bandwidth than SOA, and scalability in SOA is generally not possible or requires significant effort to be achieved. We conclude that the implementation of SOA and MSA depends on the nature and needs of organizations (e.g., performance or interoperability).