Emergent Microservices in Emergent Ecosystems

Abstract

Microservices deployed on cloud infrastructures are becoming the de facto standard for creating large-scale adaptive systems. This scenario is due to the current demand for flexible and adaptive solutions to deal with increasingly volatile operating environments. However, microservices do not solve the entire problem on their own. To provide the required levels of flexibility and adaptation demanded by modern systems, a set of technologies have to be jointly used. Technologies such as containers, auto-scalers, load balancers, cache applications and API gateways are commonly seen as part of microservice’s ecosystem. We argue that managing all these composing elements of this ecosystem is becoming too complicated and that we need autonomous solutions to manage and adapt these elements, including the microservice itself. Therefore, we propose the concept of Emergent Microservice and Emergent Ecosystems. These concepts consist of adding autonomic loops in each participating element, making them able to evolve their behaviour to support runtime and autonomous system adaptation. Further to that, these concepts make microservice-based systems capable of dealing with the increasing changes in the systems’ operating environment.