Master's Thesis Rajendra Kharbuja

Title: Designing a business platform using microservices

Abstract

Architecture style has evolved a long way from monolithic to service oriented architecture. Microservices architecture, after its introduction in mid of 2013, has been receiving a huge amount of attention. As other architectural styles, microservices presents its approach by focusing on increasing cohesion and decreasing coupling. Besides that, it breaks down system along business domains following single responsibility principle. This leads to various clear advantages such as independent build and life cycle of features, fast response to changes etc.

However, the process to create microservices is  neither clearly communicated nor and documented. There is no specific guidelines regarding when and how microservices should be designed. Moreover, there are still confusion related to various topics such as, what should be avoided to get best advantages of microservices, how to accurately map business context to microservices and how big or small a microservice should be, etc.

The thesis will attempt to simplify the confusion presented earlier. To accomplish that, a detailed study of scientific literature as well as industrial case study will be used. Firstly, the process applied by Hybris will be studied followed by the challenges it has aimed for. Then, the process of creating microservices in general will be studied according to scientific literature. Using the knowledge, a specific set of guideliness as well as points to be avoided will be created. Finally, the guidelines will be critically analyzed by the domain experts. 

Research Questions

1. How are the boundaries and size of microservice defined?
2. What are the challenges in the microservice architecture?
3. What are the best practices for defining microservice architecture?

References

Newman, S. (2015): Building Microservices Designing Fine –Grained Systems. O’REILLY
Woolf, B. & Hohpe, G. (2003): Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions. The Addition Wesley Signature Series
Vernon, V. (2013): Implementing Domain-Driven Design. DDD Community
Webber, J. & Parastatidis, S. & Robinson, I. (2010): REST in Practice Hypermedia and Systems Architecture. O’REILLY