Experiments on the Development Cost of Service Integration

Service integration is essential to modern distributed systems, such as microservices. During the software design, different services and their integration should be considered based on cost, complexity, reliability, and user experience. Good user experience requires reliable services that are usually complex and costly. To measure the complexity and cost, a single service was integrated with three different ways. A synchronous and two message-based integration approaches were implemented and compared from the point of view of code complexity to estimate their development cost. Code metrics, used technologies, and infrastructure are also considered in the estimation. The relative cost of these approaches is calculated based on experimental results. Results show that the cost of message-based integration is tenfold of the synchronous approach. Experimental results may help during the estimations in project planning.