Pattern-based Modelling, Integration, and Deployment of Microservice Architectures

Microservice-based architectures (MSAs) gained momentum in industrial and research communities since finer-grained and more independent components foster reuse and reduce time to market. However, to come from the design of MSAs to running applications, substantial knowledge and technology-specific expertise in the deployment and integration of microservices is needed. In this paper, we propose a model-driven and pattern-based approach for composing microservices, which facilitates the transition from architectural models to running deployments. Using a unified modelling for MSAs, including both their integration based on Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) and deployment aspects, our approach enables automatically generating the artefacts for deploying microservice compositions. This helps abstracting away the underlying infrastructure including container orchestration platforms and middleware layer for service integration. To validate the feasibility of our approach, we illustrate its prototypical implementation, with Kubernetes used as container orchestration system and OpenFaaS used for managing integration logic, and we present a case study.