A Representative, Low-Cost, and Easy-to-Deploy Microservices Application for Research Purposes

Abstract Microservices applications have become popular for large-scale software systems because they enable independent development, deployment, monitoring, and scaling of individual services. Despite these benefits, the increased complexity makes monitoring more difficult, thus raising challenges for performance and dependability. Consequently, finding bottlenecks, identifying failures, and pinpointing their root causes becomes more difficult. This has sparked interest from industry and academia in representative applications for research purposes. Existing research applications are often constrained in size, technology, and real-world representativeness. Some might be expensive to run; some are not actively maintained. We thus propose a microservices application that leverages diverse technologies, communication methods, and organizational paradigms. Our approach involves developing a cost-conscious application tailored for resource-constrained research groups. It boasts horizontal scalability to accommodate significant workloads and seamless deployment on the cloud with minimal effort. Our application may serve as an entry point to the microservices paradigm for research communities, thereby contributing to the advancement of knowledge and practical applications in the field.